COLTEK’S Final Year Students Undergo Pre-NSS Orientation – 2018

All final year students of the College of Technology Education, Kumasi (COLTEK) have undergone a day’s orientation that sought to expose them to the rudiments necessary to preparing for, and going through the year-long mandatory National Service upon completion of their respective programmes. The pre-service preparatory event was made possible through the collaboration of COLTEK’s Office of the Vice-Dean of Student Affairs, the Department of Academic Affairs and the Ashanti Regional Directorate of the National Service Secretariat (NSS). Presentations on the history of the National Service Scheme, steps involved in doing online registration and the required processes and management of the E-zwich allowance payment system were made in addition to a protracted session of questions and answers.

Vice-Dean of Student Affairs, Rev. Dr. Joseph Mbawuni asked the students to pay particular attention to all that were to be exposed to them since that would help preempt potential challenges that they were likely to face in the course of signing up for the scheme and in the course of serving. “National Service is one blessing that is helping fresh graduates to find opportunities that they would otherwise not find and therefore I implore you to give off your best service possible when you are posted. You never know when your attitude during the period would become a door opener to greater opportunities or otherwise”, he said. The Regional Director of the NSS, Mr. Alex Opoku-Mensah who gave an elaborate speech on the history of the Scheme, said to this reporter in an interview that his outfit had committed itself to finding ways to obviate any obstacles that the personnel might face during the service period. The introduction of the online registration, he said was one of such moves to ease the challenges and also to block a key means by which charlatans were hitherto abusing the scheme for their personal gain. “We still have some institutional heads conniving with criminals to cheat the state through the scheme. Some of them are full time workers who should not wear the cloak of service personnel to collect the allowance as an additional income. There are others who do not go the areas of their posting at all, they only connive with the heads to endorse the allowance collection forms so they could collect and share with them (heads), he explained. He said managers of the scheme were well aware of the situation and they had started a special monitoring effort to weed out such miscreants. “Once we catch you, we hand you over to the police for prosecution in addition to retrieving all allowances paid to you with interest”, he warned and called for cooperation from the public to stop such “nation wreckers”.