The Coordinator of the National Youth Authority (NYA) Mr. Ras Mubarak has in an interview on the Citi Breakfast Show expressed his readiness to make the Authority more effective.
He expressed the need and readiness to wean the Authority off government’s support end the perennial lack of funds to support the NYA in their activities.
According to him, the youth is a part of the Ghanaian community that has not been given much attention even by the Ministry of Youth and Sports.
He said, “sports is the heartbeat of the country, and we have given a lot of attention to sports. I was saddened when my minister went to parliament and sort of the questions that came were about sports. When he had the meet the press series, out of about 40 questions that were asked 80% of those questions were about sports. We were asking ourselves whether we are interested in young people at all. It is a raft of things that we have all done to make it that way.”
He buttressed this point by saying that the same amount effort put into sports should be put into developing the youth.
“We have a very youthful population and that population could be an opportunity for us to do great things. If we don’t manage it appropriately as well, it could cause problems for our country. That’s why the national youth authority for instance, is working tirelessly to get certain things going to build the capacity of young people, to draw peoples’ minds to the need to be a bit selfless and be devoted to mother Ghana because we all rise and fall together.”
Mr. Mubarak said he accepted to be the Coordinator of NYA, Mr. Mubarak because of his passion for the country’s youth.
“It is a call to duty. I love public service and because of my passion for youth development as well, I felt it was a unique opportunity to get to do something differently and get to be able to re-brand the national youth authority. It is the foremost authority in the country responsible for facilitating youth development. But even GYEEDA is popular than the NYA. Whereas we’ve had the NYA since 1974 when it was created by law, so there is a lot that needs doing and it is just one agency of government. That is what I’ve been saying time and again, that the Youth authority alone cannot do it; all of us, our partners in the media, young and old, would have to give us a lending hand to be able to help our young people,” he explained.
He revealed that the NYA has been unsuccessful in the past because “well, there has been a lot of commitment since 1992 towards helping young people in the country. .the issues are varied and diverse, in all probability you are unable to give jobs to every young person in your country. But policies would have to be in place to engage them positively. As I speak to you for the first time in the history of the NYA, we have an implementation plan for the National Youth policy. Over the past forty years, we’ve had youth policies that were not accompanied by action plans. We have successfully developed the implementation plan that took on the support of young people across the country and Government has whole-heartedly embraced that” he said.
by: Ewurabena Hagan/citifmonline.com/Ghana
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