Accra: Mr. Akwasi Agyei Annim, a journalist, has urged the government to find avenues of creating sustainable jobs for the many unemployed youth and Ghanaians in general. 'What I can tell you is that successive governments have always been complaining and crying over how to create realistic jobs for people, sustainable jobs for people, but these jobs can only come from the sectors of the economy where Ghana has comparative advantage, and you're talking about where you do better than other countries.'
According to Ghana News Agency, the journalist stressed that Ghana could do better in cocoa production saying 'thus, second to Ivory Coast, which is the largest cocoa producer in the world. But the question is, what percentage of the cocoa industry's overall benefit do we get? Between Ghana and Ivory Coast who produce 20 per cent of the total cocoa industry raw beans, we are benefiting just five per cent of the total benefit that comes from cocoa industry.'
He explained that value addition was the way to go and the government through the Finance Minister must put out strategic mechanism to increase local value addition to these raw materials to create more jobs. 'So, my expectation from the budget is that the government must look at how they can embrace value addition so that our export commodities will be more valuable and can bring in again more - value addition, that is where you can create realistic jobs. This is because when you harvest it and you export it at the base level levels, you get little revenue'.
He said, 'you take bauxite and manganese as a raw material, and you export it like that. It goes there to create a lot of jobs for people, because it will go through all the series of processing before the final product will come out. We need the Minister to speak to how government is intending to at least take 20 per cent of the job that we create for foreigners who take our bauxite and manganese'.
He warned, 'If we don't begin to create real jobs from the bauxite, manganese and cocoa, we'll end up embracing the temporary employment like NYEP, YESDEP, NABCO, which do not have a future.'
