This year’s registration of National Service personnel in the Greater Accra Region began yesterday with a large number of people who besieged the Greater Accra office of the scheme.
There were long and winding queues of personnel hwo had thronged the premises of the Regional National Service Scheme (NSS) who wanted t register.
Some of the personnel who got to the premises of the scheme as early as 4:30 am couel not get themselves registered as of 12:00 midday although the process of registering is simply the writing of names and handling of the posting forms.
Over 25, 700 personnel have been deployed to the Greater Accra Region out of the 80,000 deployed throughout the country for the 2016/2017 service year.
Enquiries by The Enquirer revealed that although the registration is a month-long exercise which closes on August 31, this year, personnel chose to get registered with the reasons that they do not want to be met with news of no vacancies if they should report at their duty post later when others have gone ahead of them.
The large number, the paper gathered, was as a result of relocating the district offices of the NSS to the regional office when that was not the case in the past.
In the past, personnel were to do their registration at the various NSS district offices which recorded little or no huge numbers at all and those who were posted to the Accra Metro were allowed to register at the regional NSS office.
But paper found out that the decision to bring all the districts to the regional office for registration which led to the confusion and the large number was one of the measures to curtail the menace of ghost names which rocked the scheme in that famous National Service corruption scandal.
The acting executive director of the NSS, Dr. Michael Kpessa-Whyte, yesterday to monitor the registration, told journalists he was surprised at the numbers.
According to him, measures were put in place to space out the registration of the personnel to avoid the crowd but seeing the numbers suggests there was anxiety on the part of the personnel to get registered.
He was however optimistic that the crowd should reduce after three days during which as many would have registered, while advising the personnel to take it easy by going back home to appear later and that their postings are secured.
This notwithstanding, he gave hints of the head office reviewing the strategy of the posing moving into the next postings for 2017/2018.
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