Accra, March 3, GNA – Mr Eric Edem Agbana, the Deputy National Youth Organiser of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), has appealed to law students to begin to advocate youth development plans to ensure the holistic development of young people.
“We must begin to advocate better systems for young people, but who are those better equipped to speak about it, rather than you and I who have received the benefit of education,” he said.
Mr Agbana said this at a three-day symposium at GIMPA in Accra, organised by the Students Representative Council of the Ghana School of Law, to orientate law students on the need to advocate youth development during their careers as lawyers.
“I want to plead with you that we cannot build a better society if all of us are not conscious to the fact that we have only one country, called Ghana, and must place her interest ahead of all our partisan and individual interests,” he said.
He said society placed much nobility on the law profession and, therefore, greater responsibility rested on lawyers in terms of advocacy for better services for the youth.
“A greater responsibility rests on your shoulders and, therefore, you cannot afford to pay attention to only to your books. You need to be part of the system; be part of the solution so that we can solve issues together,” Mr Agbana told the upcoming lawyers.
“I have always said that one of the reasons leaders get away with mediocrity in our country today is because young people who are supposed to be speaking out refuse to speak.”
He said there was the need for government to put in place deliberate strategic policies to build the skills of the youth while responding to the needs of the times rather than the temporal jobs being provided them.
“I recalled that in 2020 one of my favourite policies in the NDC’s Manifesto was the one million coding programme where we intended to train one million young people in coding and web development….,” Mr Agbana said.
“With the skills of coding and web development, in your own small corner, you can make so much money and you would not need to depend on the Government to provide you with any job.”
He said Ghanaians would be paying lip service to youth development if the inequalities in the country’s educational system at the basic level were not fixed.
He called for programmes, actions and systems to support young people to achieve their fullest potentials adding that the country could achieve that through education, experience sharing, and mentorship, which would assist the youth to connect to mentors to guide them in their chosen professions.
GNA