Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah says politicians exploit jobless youth without solutions
The numbers tell a story that no administration wants to own, but none has been able to escape. Two million Ghanaians are unemployed. Over 500,000 applicants competing for 5,000 security services positions. A problem that has persisted across governments of both parties, through boom years and bailout years alike, and which, in the assessment of one sitting lawmaker, continues to be managed politically rather than solved structurally.
Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah, Member of Parliament for Manhyia South and Vice Chairman of Parliament’s Subsidiary Legislative Committee, used an appearance on the AM Show to offer a rare moment of bipartisan candour on what has become one of Ghana’s most enduring governance failures.
“Politicians, we are taking advantage of the situation without a solution to it. When you come, you campaign to win political power with a hope of creating employment for the teeming youth,” he said, an admission that cut across party lines and implicated the entire political class, including himself.
The MP traced the current crisis back to the tail end of President Mahama’s first term, by which point youth unemployment had become so acute that affected graduates formed their own association to give a collective voice to their frustration. When the NPP took office in 2017 under President Akufo-Addo, the response was the Nation Builders Corps, a programme that ultimately attracted over 800,000 enrollees and provided a temporary lifeline for many. But NABCO did not survive the economic pressures that followed the COVID-19 pandemic and Ghana’s subsequent IMF bailout programme. It was suspended, and the young people it had absorbed were left to navigate a labour market that had not fundamentally changed.
Now, with Mahama back in office following the December 2024 elections, the same crisis awaits. In his State of the Nation Address, the President acknowledged approximately two million unemployed Ghanaians, a figure that sets the scale of the challenge his administration has inherited, and in some measure helped create.
The recent security services recruitment exercise was designed, in part, as a visible response to that pressure. Interior Minister Muntaka Mohammed-Mubarak framed it as a merit-based exercise with zero tolerance for corruption, personally visiting screening centres to verify the process was being conducted properly. He also pointed to auxiliary programmes, community police and fire assistant initiatives, that have already absorbed 25,000 youth and indicated that data of qualified but unsuccessful applicants would be retained for a possible second recruitment phase in 2026, subject to Ghana’s fiscal position following its IMF programme.
But the numbers surrounding the exercise have raised as many questions as they have answered. The Minority in Parliament noted that the exercise generated over GHS 111 million in application fees, a figure that, set against the reality that only 5,000 of more than 500,000 applicants would ultimately be recruited, has reignited long-running debates about who really benefits from the way Ghana runs its public sector recruitment. Thousands more were disqualified not on merit but due to technical difficulties with the online aptitude test, a digital barrier that disproportionately affected applicants from rural areas with limited access to technology.
For the Manhyia South MP, the pattern is clear, and it is a pattern that extends far beyond any single recruitment exercise or any single administration.
Ghana has been here before. It will be here again unless the conversation shifts from managing the symptoms of unemployment to addressing its structural causes, the lack of private sector growth, the inadequacy of skills development, the disconnect between educational outputs and labour market demands, and the persistent failure to build an economy that creates jobs faster than it creates job seekers.
The political window dressing changes with every election. The underlying problem does not.
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