The Director-General of the National Sports Authority of Ghana, Professor Peter Twumasi, has stressed the need for policy makers to look into the agriculture sector and identify the hindrances and improve upon the conditions in the sector.
Twumasi as a young student farmer
The move, the former Head of Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology, College of Science at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), said would help attract more potential hands to grow our economy and to increase income levels of our energetic youth and students and make them financially self-reliant.
His proposition comes from his conviction that a section of business minded leaders have questioned why student jobs, as well as casual employment for young people do not exist in our country today, unlike our Western and Asian counterparts, hence the need to involve everybody to contribute in addressing what he described as a reasonable concern.
The renowned Biochemist, Author and Professor noted that apart from harnessing energies built up in our youth for the growth of the economy, students’ jobs also provide opportunities for them to earn income to complement support from parents, as well us getting the requisite working experiences to catapult them to bigger responsibilities at work places after graduation and in full employment status.
The NSA Director–General indicated that Agriculture is the area where Ghana identifies its maximum strength to compete with other nations like; The Netherlands, USA, Brazil and Ukraine for food production and exports.
As a result, he has suggested that every aspect of our educational system must direct its attention to the agricultural sector to help utilise the untapped potential of this sector noting that in today’s post-COVID19 era, the nation with food, not gold or machines, is the wealthiest.
According to the Varsity don, students gain confidence at work, build network with colleague workers and business owners and at the same time become efficient with time management, while at school or home and advised that job opportunities based on the priorities, which may vary across various economies, are created and made available to attract and recruit student workers.
He cited the situation in Ghana, where in the agricultural sector, from the farm to harvesting, transportation, sales and distribution, processing and preservation and exports are our hallmark, with competitive advantage over many nations on the globe, unlike in Europe or America, where there are not many job vacancies in our supermarkets, malls, cleaning services, factories, etc.
Prof. Twumasi wondered why students have stopped working on farms (both animals and crops) and get involved in harvesting of food and transportation, participating in food sales, distribution and processing to earn an income or to help contribute to income generation of their families.
Reminiscing his school days, Prof. Twumasi said many of his colleagues took farming work seriously and worked alongside their parents in managing cocoa farms, food crops and animals, sale of food produce, as well as being regularly assigned duties.
He said the practice enabled them to earn direct incomes to support their education or contributed to the overall family income being managed by parents, which practice he later realised pertained in most advanced countries, where students and the youth take up part-time jobs on farms, supermarkets, cleaning companies and others.
Prof. Twumasi also recalled that almost all Ghanaian students abroad perform these extra-duties to support their education and to remit their families back home and revealed that while studying in the Netherlands in the early 2000, his four-hour part-time cleaning and farm jobs enabled him to put up a house back in Ghana, besides the support he gave his family and dependants in Ghana and elsewhere.
The Biochemist bemoaned the situation where students refused to take up laboratory cleaning jobs when he was Head of Department in one of Ghana’s premier universities, despite enormous free time they had to waste in their hostels and halls.
He has, therefore, encouraged the modern Ghanaian student not to financially depend on families but urgently seek to work like their counterparts elsewhere, while the government creates the enabling environment by identifying the hindrances and improve upon the conditions in the sector and thereby attract the youth to venture into the agriculture sector.
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