Ghana’s Minority in Parliament has thrown down the gauntlet, demanding that the Ministry of the Interior return approximately GH¢113 million collected from hundreds of thousands of applicants who did not make the cut in the recent security service recruitment exercise.
The call comes in the wake of startling figures disclosed by the Minister for the Interior, Mubarak Mohammed Muntaka, who revealed that while nearly 500,000 people applied for positions across the country’s security agencies, only 5,000 slots are available for final enlistment. Of those who applied, more than 105,000 have qualified for the medical screening stage, a number that still dwarfs the available positions by a staggering margin.
For the Minority, those figures tell a damning story. Addressing journalists on Thursday, March 12, 2026, the Ranking Member on the Defence and Interior Committee, Rev. John Ntim Fordjour, accused the government of deliberately misleading applicants and exploiting their desperation for employment.
“Already, we have a national security threat and unemployment on our hands. You promised them jobs. You didn’t add any conditions,” he charged. He argued that the government’s decision to expand the eligible age limit from twenty-five to thirty-five sent a deliberate signal that more opportunities were available, a promise he says was never real.
“You knew from the very beginning you were recruiting only 5,000, and yet you did all this to lure half a million people, took their money, milked them GH¢113 million cedis and over, only to turn around yesterday, after you have knocked them out by technology and internet disruptions from the aptitude test,” he said.
Rev. Fordjour’s remarks paint a picture of a recruitment process that, in the Minority’s view, was less about finding qualified personnel and more about generating revenue at the expense of vulnerable, unemployed young Ghanaians. He called not only for a full refund of the money collected but also for an independent investigation into how the exercise was conducted.
Looking ahead, he urged the government to overhaul how future recruitment exercises are managed, demanding greater transparency and stronger safeguards to ensure that applicants are never again subjected to what he described as outright financial exploitation.
Source: Apexnewsgh.com