The National Service Secretariat (NSS) has, often-times, been accused of delaying the release of monthly stipends of personnel. No official communication has ever been issued over this mishap, but it has now been revealed that it is the personnel themselves who are causing the problem.
According to the Chief Executive Officer of the NSS, Osei Assibey Antwi, personnel undertaking their mandatory national service often delay submitting the relevant documents to aid in the payment of their allowances.
He led the NSS to appear before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Thursday, February 15, 2024 to respond to queries cited by the Auditor General in its report.
As a public interest question, a member of the committee, Kwame Dzudzorli Gakpey, MP for Keta, asked “What accounts for the delay in payment of the monthly allowances of National Service personnel?”
DELAY
In his response, the NSS boss laid the blame squarely at the doorstep of the personnel, citing that the majority of the current batch have not submitted their documents yet.
He explained that, considering the measures put in place to ensure value for money, a lot of validation processes are undertaken before payment is authorised.
As such, they gather about 70% or 80% of the personnel’s documents before submitting them to the Auditors and the Controller General for payment of the allowances.
“Mr. Chairman, first of all, NSS is widespread in numbers and to be able to ensure value for money, we actually have to go through a lot of strenuous validation processes, and a lot of them delay the submission.
“The youth of today are not like us when we were doing our national service, where we were taken to time; each of them should submit by fifteenth, and they will submit by fifteenth,” he said.
Mr. Antwi continued, “Mr. Chairman, it will actually surprise you to know that we are in February, but a large number of the current batch have not even been able to submit their appointment letters.
“So, always you have to be on them, and the way the system is structured, if you don’t get more than 70% and 80% to submit and then you decide to submit in pieces, it becomes difficult, because first it has to go through the Auditors and from there it goes through the Controller. So, the process is quite long.”
Meanwhile, he said the NSS was in talks with the leadership of the National Service Personnel Association (NASPA) to solve the issue with the current batch.
ALLOWANCE
The NSS, in July 2023, secured approval from the government for an upward adjustment of the monthly allowances for National Service Personnel from GH¢559.04 to GH¢715.57.
The approval was contained in a letter dated July 18, 2023 and signed by the Deputy Minister for Finance, Abena Osei-Asare MP.
The increment followed a series of engagements between the National Service Scheme, the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission and the Ministry of Finance.
BACKGROUND
Established in 1973, the NSS is a Government of Ghana programme under the Ministry of Education, with a National Secretariat in Accra and offices in all administrative regions and districts across the country.
The scheme is mandated to deploy a pool of skilled manpower drawn primarily from tertiary institutions to support the development efforts of both the public and private sectors in Ghana.
Although it is a citizenry requirement for all Ghanaians who are eighteen years above, it is currently limited to and mandatory for all Ghanaians graduating from tertiary educational institutions who are not less than eighteen years old.
The original intent of deploying freshly graduating youth under the NSS arrangement was to ensure that priority sectors of national life were not lacking in the requisite human resources needed for development.
