Youths from the opposition party, the MDC-T, have questioned the government’s resource allocation and prioritisation followin the government’s decision to reintroduce the National Youth Service, commonly called the Border Gezi training. The youths questioned where the government was going to get the resources to support the program seeing as it is struggling to pay civil servants their monthly salaries. The government has also committed to pay the 2016 Bonuses to civil servants, but the $180 million for this was not budgeted.
The party’s youth assembly spokesperson, Brian Dube, said:
We have doctors and nurses on strike while other civil servants are disgruntled for poor and erratic remuneration yet one wonders where the same government gets resources to feed thousands of youths at training camps and over 200 people employed to train them,
There is no justification for this programme as there is no baseline survey to assess the needs and acceptability of the curriculum for any legitimate youth service in the country.
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