The Acting Executive Director of the National Service Scheme (NSS), Dr Michael Kpessa-Whyte, has defended a decision to deploy new service personnel to direct traffic in the country.
He insisted that the personnel willingly selected the module themselves.
[contextly_sidebar id=”q4G5T0T4EBSG1IBZuw0mQhKHWq7F0nwQ”]“…We posted them there because the majority of them opted for those option during the enrolment process. Nobody imposed it on them, even if we did, I believe that they are doing the right thing for the country,” he noted.
About 1,000 graduates from various tertiary institutions will help the Police to control traffic under it’s new module called: “Urban traffic management.”
Some Ghanaians have questioned the rationale for the module asking why tertiary graduates should be serving the nation on the streets.
But justifying the module in an interview on the Citi Breakfast Show, Dr Kpessa-Whyte insisted that they did no wrong by deploying the personnel to the streets.
He argued that “as a country, our society is changing very fast, our society is transforming and transformation comes with many challenges. One of the challenges is congestion of vehicles on our roads on day-to-day basis, and we thought that they will help beef up the visibility of the Police on our streets.”
He noted that those deployed to Accra have begun their training while those in Kumasi will follow suit soon.
“600 are expected to be in Accra, 400 are expected to be in Kumasi. Yesterday the training for those personnel has started in Accra and we expect that after theirs, there would be the Kumasi one and then we go on,” he added.
Their duties
On the duties of the personnel, Dr. Kpessa-Whyte said “they are being taken through that at the Police training school within the next two weeks which started yesterday. I believe they are being given various lessons in relation to what it takes to be an effective personnel on the street managing the flow of vehicles. They are also being exposed to the issue that the Police service deal with on regular basis as long as road traffic management is concerned.”
Justification
“There are Police officers who are lawyers, doctors, engineers, architects, when the need arises, they are also sent to the streets to help the flow of traffic and it is we ordinary citizens who are often in the traffic that these people are helping. How different is that from asking our young men and women coming out of our tertiary institutions to be exposed to a similar procedure,” the NSS boss opined.
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By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana