Sales of Job Forms and Appointment Notices to Citizens Re-echoed: Where is the equal Job Opportunity Enshrined in the 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Ghana?

Writing is deliberate in all sincerity, and the propeller of writing is consciousness. I don’t know the standard methodologies to effect consciousness in anyone nearby me, but I must be candid about the fact that its drive is based on our prevailing living conditions and the realities encompassed. It equally boils down to we appealing to the minds of the kindred with a more or less insatiable thrust to let them willingly appreciate the exigencies of the time and the ensuing generation soon to come. A friend by the name of Mohammed Zachariah Sanusi once told me that "the value of a smile is absolutely priceless, and yet it is the cheapest, easiest, most rewarding and most sincere gift to anyone that crosses your way. A smile makes a person's day, anybody's day, even a stranger's day. A smile is highly 'infectious'. Start 'infecting' people with your smiles today.”

This was during my undergraduate studies, and I have since tried to live by this quote in my own way, though others may have difficulties aligning with my position. That cannot be the troubling spot, but for anyone to think of living a good life today without caring for the next generation leaves me with no description of a leader who once never meant safe living standards for his people and how not to govern. If you know, you know! This is more than just infecting onlookers or passers-by with a show of teeth or smiles. Therefore, what genuinely is expected to bring joy to anyone irrespective of greed, religion, tribe, political affiliation, geographical location, gender, ability, and what have you is good-heartedness to all?

I have always been left slanderous in the doldrums of not knowing where we are leading ourselves to, and it is because our attitudes towards one another have become obscenely treacherous. I have always stated and maintained that if I were to be appointed to GES by the state today, formal education and job opportunities would seem unattainable. Truly, the professional art of soil tillage, where we humbly began, would have been our confinement to date and to the end of life. Apologies, this is to respectfully acknowledge our humble beginnings under our parents' teachings and trainings to fend for ourselves and our consanguineous families. Admittedly, the dynamics of today have drastically changed, and that explains why we seem not to pend with the sweeping current, but rather we shun or relegate agriculture to the peasants while it is being preached as the mainstay of the economy by politicians.

Indeed, how we are as a people on gifted arable lands for a myriad of agricultural purposes while we choose to devastate the same lands without the cognisance of the repercussions playing out leaves me to wonder the sort of gammoned buoyant pride we arrogate to ourselves. We pride ourselves on the world fronts for our excellently unmatched education that continuously grooms us into strategic international bodies, but our backyard back home is daunting and foul. Well, it is another debate for another time. The issue as a dementia is the journal by Francis A. Baaladong published on “The Trial News” dubbed “Scrap the Obnoxious Sale of Security Recruitment Forms”. This is scandalous, to say the least. For all that you know, a minister of state or party bigwig (which I don’t want to believe) is giving this obnoxious act gravity, and we have seen that before in the erstwhile administration, typical of the immediate education minister. Common senior high school placement too was not spared, and they call themselves patriots and nationalists. What a farce!

I don’t want to sound political, but it is what it is. For instance, appointment notices to citizens in the Ghana Education Service (GES) were sold in this same country for the first time since 2017, and it has festered to date, and who knows the twilight of the silly act? For the security services or forces, which range from the navy, military, fire, prisons, customs, immigration, national security, and you name it, you can also guess when this preposterous sale of jobs started. The electoral commission, land commission, mineral commission, judiciary service, and what have you require compromised procedures for one to get appointed as a worker, supposedly enshrined in the 1992 constitution for equal job opportunities for all. Where lies the equal opportunity we are all supposed to enjoy when organic credence and true merit are thrown to the savage ones in office positions and the government officials of the day? Let’s not say it is me who is saying it when we all know that abnormalities are being normalised through who pays the fattest cash or whom you “know” are the order of the day, and for the opposite venereal situation, I rest my case.

The angle I am coming from is simple. Assuming some of us were among the membership of the Unemployed Graduate Association today or 8 years back and we are looking up to the government as a sole employer, naturally you will default to your umbilical profession highlighted in this part of the country. Truly, many citizens have faith in the current government to reset the cannibalistic wrongs perpetuated by the Akuffo Addo and Bawumia-led government for good governance and fair/firm justice delivery. As much as possible, we all need equal job opportunities through the well-known procedure by all, and above all, our recruitments ought to be meritoriously bound. Persons found culpable in this regard under the previous government, we are being told the AG is still gathering evidence to arraign them before courts of competent juries for such dastardly acts visited on the youth of tomorrow. Failure to do as advertised by the ORAL campaign will end up disastrous.

However, the obnoxious sale of forms as a start for one to yield hope is left only in the hands of the rich, which includes the sale of appointment notices. The constitution of Ghana frowns on that in clear terms. The growing culture of trading job opportunities cannot be allowed to go on any further and must be nipped in the bud completely. The citizenry cannot afford to continue to purchase jobs in this country, and what then will hold for tomorrow? Think, act swiftly.