Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show on Monday, a deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture, George Oduro said many of those employed under the programme help with a number of farming activities including the tilling of lands and the harvesting of crops.

“…This is [a] full-time job. You start from land preparation until harvesting…These are not jobs that you go for interviews,” he added.

[contextly_sidebar id=”etr3eKxOB4i1ohesseGiDQtVDYfrVub8″]The deputy Minister’s comments follow suggestions the 745,000 jobs government claims to have created under the Planting for Food and Jobs programme were rather short-term ventures that would end after a few months.

Some critics have suggested that these ventures should be classified as “activities and not jobs” as they are not sustainable for the entire year.

The Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr. Owusu Akoto Afriyie, who first made the announcement said most of the jobs which had been created were “unofficial jobs” and not subject to taxation.

“… the Planting for Food and Jobs campaign has absorbed this [rural] labour to the extent that we targeted 750,000 rural labour and we were able to generate 745,000 jobs and these jobs are unofficial jobs. They are not pensionable, they are not tax deductible so you cannot actually measure it like those in the formal sector where you re-registered, you are paid a wage, you have to pay tax and so on and therefore, it is very easy to monitor.”

But some observers including the Member of Parliament for the Keta constituency, Richard Quarshigah, have called on the Agric Ministry to provide clearer details on the jobs created.

“If you have created [745,000] jobs, you must have some tangibilities to that effect. You are not giving us any figures. You are not telling us the number of jobs that were created within the various sectors within the value chain,” the NDC MP told Citi News.

But defending the numbers, the Deputy Agric Minister said per the programme, each farmer is required to have two helping hands for every hector of land cultivated, adding that those engaged will help the farmers throughout the year.

“They do it from the land preparation up to harvesting. You know the farmer will need these two hands to help with the weeding, harvesting and then to the marketing sector. So when you start an acre of a land preparation, it will take you about a month, after that you do the planting, after the planting you will be doing the weeding, then you apply fertilizer and then you do the harvesting.”

“So all these processes will take you through the year until after harvesting. It’s a yearlong programme; it’s not about one day or two days matter. And they [helping hands] are not there just to apply fertilizer, no; they will be doing everything up to harvesting. One hector is 2.5 acres. It’s a vast land. So two people as helping hands with a farmer will be helpful,” he added.

Click below for George Oduro’s full interview on the Citi Breakfast Show: 

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By: Godwin Akweiteh Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @AlloteyGodwin

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Admitting that he couldn’t “vouch for those figures,” the Union’s General Secretary, Edward Kareweh said on Eyewitness News that the number will have to be treated to more scrutiny.

[contextly_sidebar id=”fc9ZFqTTlABK8GmMdQZRdQhwmXgbUGnl”]The Food and Agriculture Minister, Dr. Afriyie Akoto announced that 745,000 jobs had been created under the first phase of the Planting for Food and Jobs programme with the caveat that the jobs were “unofficial jobs.”

The minister explained to the media that the jobs were created in rural areas and were essentially not taxable and did not contribute to pension funds following the earlier scepticism that met the announced figure.

The figures were based on the number of additional inputs as well as improved seeds and fertilizers supplied to participating farmers in 2017.

Jobs must be tangible

Mr. Kareweh expects the jobs created in the sector to be tangible as he noted that “if someone is in employment, you can see, so it is easier to verify. When you don’t see, it does not exist.”

Furthermore, he said the government needed to show how those jobs are generated because “if we are indeed able to generate such jobs, it would endear confidence in whatever we are doing and then, within a very short period, in our development trajectory, we will be able to curb the huge unemployment levels in our economy. But for the 745,000 jobs, we need to interrogate it further and the minister needs to come out much and prove to all of us that indeed these jobs have been created.”

To highlight how the figures could possibly be skewed, Mr. Kareweh remarked that, “even within the crop sub-sector, it is only five crops that were targeted and only five crops with 200,000 farmers could generate 745,000 jobs for us?”

Per the government’s trajectory, he said the crop sector alone could generate 2 million jobs and “within two years, there will virtually be no unemployment in this country and that doesn’t appear to be so.”

Aside from this, Mr. Kareweh said the jobs created needed to be sustainable.

“If you give jobs to someone for only a short period, two days or five days, that is not the type of job we are talking about and no one can live on a five-day job that has been given to them… we need to actually move beyond just putting the figures out there and also talk about jobs people can live on.”

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By: Delali Adogla-Bessa/citifmonline.com/Ghana

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The Ministry of Agriculture had announced earlier in October, that it had tabled the requests from the students for the restoration of their allowances before Cabinet.

[contextly_sidebar id=”kYXuwm1nmKrPv73WBsqACCAH7j60Zsmn”]That announcement was made following agitations from students of five of the colleges, who besieged the premises of the Agric Ministry in Accra last Wednesday, demanding the immediate release of their allowances.

However, since Cabinet convened last Thursday, there has been no updates of a possible restoration of the allowances, forcing the students to ditch their classes in an attempt to force the government to act.

Citi News checks at the school revealed that, red bands had been tied at the dormitories and lecture halls, a traditional sign of protest.

The President of the school’s Students Representative Council (SRC), Stanley Mensah, stated that, the action had become necessary because of the apparent disregard for Agric students across the country by the government.

In an interview with Citi News, he insisted that despite the negative implications their boycott will create, they were justified in their demands, as unlike the nurses and teachers, they weren’t guaranteed jobs and needed the allowances to survive.

“We think that either somebody is not being fair or something is wrong somewhere. That is why we believe that all the students have to come together, leave the premises of the school until the Ministry is done with the processes to get our allowances for us. We are not being treated fairly, and are not being regarded in the country, so there’s no need for us to be on campus. We took our books and our things and vacated the premises of the school. As we speak, if you go to Damongo, Kwadaso or any college in Tamale, the schools are virtually empty and nobody’s there,” he said.

“Nobody will say that if you do this, it won’t affect anyone because it will. We’ve left the time for learning and we’re concentrating on the [allowances]. We are not getting direct employment like the teachers and the nurses. We feel that we’ve been neglected and devastated, and nobody’s speaking on our behalf. Management of the school don’t do anything to help us because they feel they are public servants and how can they talk about allowances when they receive their pay. They aren’t ready to do anything for us.”

4, 000 graduates to be employed

The Agric Minister, Owusu Afriyie Akoto, addressed the crowd that had besieged the Ministry, stating at the time that “cabinet has its own procedure for considering such demands, and I can assure you that your demand is seriously being considered.”

In an interview on Eyewitness News later that day, the Minister’s Press Secretary, Issah Alhassan, stated that, they had been cleared by Parliament to employ over 4, 000 graduates from the colleges who had been without jobs since 2011.

“For the past six years, no student from the Agric College has ever been employed into the public service. Now the Minister has told them emphatically that cabinet has agreed that from next year, almost 4, 000 students would be automatically employed into the public service,” he said.

The complaints of the Agric students were sparked by the restoration of allowances of trainee nurses by the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government.

The students, whose allowances were scrapped along with the nursing trainees under the Mahama administration, argue that they are being discriminated against by the government despite the assurances.

The President of the Agricultural College Students Union, Chimbu Sampson Sanika, said: “We are not satisfied with that information. We want our allowances restored so that we can go through our tenures successfully.”

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By: Edwin Kwakofi/citifmonline.com/Ghana

The post Kwadaso Agric students boycott classes over allowances appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.

According to the Association, government among other things has selected the wrong beneficiaries who will eventually collapse the programme.

[contextly_sidebar id=”tKm6hPHCzfchTyU5qihtooCNqpymL4Zb”]President Nana Akufo-Addo is expected to officially launch the program on Wednesday, April 19, 2017, but the Association has said that its assessment of the current plan for the project indicates that it is likely to fail.

The Programme Officer for the Association, Charles Kwowe Nyaaba, in a Citi News interview said the current plan excludes over 70% of peasant farmers.

“The target beneficiaries in the first place are wrong. They are targeting the large-scale farmers, and not small scale farmers, but we all know that the farmer population in Ghana, we have over 80% being small-scale farmers… The approach of recruiting extension service personnel to help in the programme is wrong. If you go to the Ministry of Agriculture at the district level, you have the extension officers there who are not able to visit farming communities because of lack of logistics. You leave all these people hanging there and you say you are bringing National Service personnel to train them to go and train the farmers. At the end of the day, if you don’t take care, they would rather go and be learning from the farmers and that is not going to give us the impact that we are looking for,” he said.

Charles Kwowe Nyaaba added that, most rural farmers will be discouraged by government’s directive that beneficiaries of the programme deposit some amount of money into a bank account.

“We are also saying that, before you benefit from the facility, government is subsidizing 50% and the farmers will pay the initial amount of the 25% and those farmers are supposed to deposit the money in a rural bank, then after that you take the chip and go, before you’ll be allowed to benefit from the facility”, he emphasized.

According to him, most farmers live in very remote communities and that makes it difficult for them to access banks for such transactions.

“It is no surprise that business people are capitalizing on the sale of these facilities at a higher price, since majority of these farmers live in the rural areas and would not like to travel thus far to the banking facilities in order to benefit from these facilities. “We are also saying that before you benefit from the facility, government is subsidizing 50% and the farmers will pay the initial amount of the 25% and those farmers are supposed to deposit the money in a rural bank, then after that you take the chip and go, before you’ll be allowed to benefit from the facility”, he emphasized.

The NPP government has said that it intends to revolutionize agriculture in the country by introducing the programme which it said will create more than 750,000 jobs.

The programme, according to the government, would also motivate farmers to grow staple foods such as maize, millet, and beans. Interested farmers are to be provided with free seedlings among other agricultural inputs and agro-chemicals such as fertilizer at reduced prices.

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is expected to launch the national ‘Planting for Food and Job programme’ at Goaso, capital of the Asunafo Municipality in the Brong-Ahafo Region.

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By: Jonas Nyabor/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @jnyabor

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This year’s award is the 19^th edition and it will be celebrated under the theme “Using development journalism to discern and defend the national interest”.

The award for the most promising young journalist of the year has been named after the late Komla Dumor with the hope that journalists who will emulate the renowned broadcaster will aspire to reach greater heights in their chosen career.

Speaking at the launch of the awards at the Ghana International Press Center, the president of the GJA, Dr. Affail Monney called on journalists to eschew biased reportage to avoid tainting the profession.

“The theme is aimed at reminding the Ghanaian media to place development at the center of their reportage. The GJA believes that whether in the area of Politics, Economy, Business, and Agriculture. Health, Energy, Environment, Science or Sports etc pursuing a development agenda is the best way forward for the Ghanaian media,” he said.

He further expressed the hope that the work of journalists will help build the nation saying, “we believe that through development journalism we stand a better chance of not only informing and educating the citizenry but monitoring national programmes and projects and providing the relevant media platform for debate and consensus building.”

Below are the categories

CATEGORY ONE (SEPARATE AWARDS FOR RADIO, TELEVISION AND PRINT)

News Reporting

Features

CATEGORY TWO (ONLY ONE AWARD TO CATER FOR BOTH PRINT AND ELECTRONIC)

Investigative Reporting

Photojournalism

Sports (Print)

Sports (Electronic Includes Commentary)

Arts/Entertainment and Domestic Tourism

Kwadwo Baah Wiredu Award for Business/Finance &Economic Reporting

Small and Micro Scale Enterprises (SMEs)

Environment

Health

HIV and AIDS

Development Journalism for Furthering MDGs

Parliamentary Reporting

Human Rights (With Focus on Children)

Political Reporting

Crime and Court Reporting

Environmental Sanitation and Hygiene

Disability

Telecommunications

On-Line Journalism

Anti-Corruption

Education (Electronic)

Education (Print Media)

Science

Oil and Gas

Anti-Narcotics

Social Security

Agriculture

Water

Rural Reporting

Local Governance and Decentralization

Forest Governace

CATEGORY THREE : ( PRINT MEDIA)

Columnist

Best Cartoonist

CATEGORY FOUR (MEDIA HOUSES ONLY)

Democracy and Peace-Building

Best Layout and Designed Newspaper

Forest Governance

Best Rural Station

Radio/TV Progarmme -Akan

Radio/TV Programmes-Dagbani

Radio/TV Programme-Ewe

Radio/Programme-Ga

Radio/Programme-Hausa

Radio/Programme Nzema

CATEGORY FIVE (JOURNALIST –OF –THE-YEAR& YOUNG JOURNALIST)

GJA/Professor P. V Ansah Journalist of the Year

Komla Dumor Most Promising Young Journalist of the Year.

All entries should be submitted at the gahan international press center before the is 30^th June 2014

Afriyie Amoakoa Mensah/citifmonline.com/Ghana

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