What Is The President Doing About The GYEEDA Report?

FEW months ago, one of the major topics on public agenda was the massive corruption, financial rot and graft exposed by the Ghana Youth Employment and Entrepreneurial Development Agency (GYEEDA) Report compiled by a committee put together by President John D. Mahama. For weeks it was discussed in newspaper pages and on all radio/television shows by analysts and people from all walks of lives who called into various shows. Today other issues have come up and the GYEEDA Report seems forgotten. AND we on Today are worried, because experience shows that when the damning issues of the discussed report is against public officials belonging to national administration and their party members the public would discuss it for a while and drop it. Thereafter national administration finds it convenient and easy to shelve the report and nothing is done on or about it till another scandal erupts in another or the same public institution. Then that old report is simply remembered and quoted extensively as historical proof of similarity to the contemporary matter that has arisen. SADLY, that is what appears to be happening with the damning GYEEDA Report, which shows with a cornucopia of evidence that over GH₵900 million has been sunk into projects of national youth employment from 2006 till date, but there is not much (not commensurate returns) to point to as results and/or achievements thereof. THERE are many modules in traffic regulation, self-employment, cottage crafts, technical crafts, vocational crafts, etc., and each began with the goal to train so many numbers of young men and women. Interestingly, the report shows that while on the official books at the GYEEDA so many have been trained there are no records of that many actual persons who could be counted as having benefited from the various training programmes. For example, GYEEDA documents could allege that 5,000 persons have been trained at so much cost, but proper investigations indicate that actually only about 50 persons have received the training in question. ALSO, records show that x amount was spent on each trainee, but forensic audit reveal that the actual amount spent was wayyy lower than x, sometimes even lower than half of x. Again, official records will indicate that each of the ghost trainees received a kit, that is, a set of equipment and items, to help them go out and establish themselves to render services for payment. In reality, however, the kits were never supplied. APART from that monies and allowances were paid to so many persons at various GYEEDA offices for no work or little work done. There were even instances of ghost names. And shockingly, there was evidence that after spending so much on nothing, GYEEDA today owes over GH₵200 million to some of the private companies it employed to provide services for various modules. THE report also unveiled instances where monies for different modules were taken from statutory funds GYEEDA had no business touching in the first place, such as GETFund and NHIS Fund. However the worst aspect of that scenario is that it was not GYEEDA, as the state authority responsible for youth training, that took the cash from those funds, but the private companies employed by GYEEDA themselves dipped their hands directly into those funds to take out money. THERE were also rampant cases of bypassing and breaching the procurement act and entrusting to sole-sourcing amounts of contracts and supplies that the act clearly states should have been subjected to tender. IN the candid opinion of we on Today, the GYEEDA Report reads like the typical story of the life and workings in any of Ghana�s public sector picked at random. So one is compelled to ask: When do we as a people say enough? And when are we going to have a president who says, TRUE THAT IS ENOUGH AND so starts prosecuting culprits, retrieving our lost monies and instilling efficiency into the public sector? WHEN!?!?! GHANA is cash-strapped and retrieving these monies will give the state some cash to do some of the actual projects we need to do for the benefit of the people.