Caught in the web of
governments’ choked capacity for direct employment and the slow pace of
industrialization, especially in Africa, thousands of fresh school graduates
join many more unemployed millions in the labour market, yearly.
The attendant poverty
and disillusionment among youths have its effect on crime rate, social escapism
and the recent craze for illegal emigration.
In Nigeria, successive
federal and state administrations are trailed with garbages of failed attempts
to provide solutions. Often poor in strategic designs, sometimes merely
politically motivated, they focused on providing handouts which only go to
sustain consumption, rather than inspire production.
Campaigns into the
2015 national elections dwelt so much on unemployment issues but, as we
complete a four year circle, many governments at various levels seem to have
disowned their promises with the National Bureau of Statistics, for instance,
reporting 3.67m job loss by the 4th quarter of 2016 and a rise in unemployment
from 7.51m by October 2015 to 11.19m by September 2016, with about 1.5m more
people entering the unemployment bracket by the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2016.
In 2017, job loss
increased to 4.07m by the 3rd quarter and the unemployed rose further from
11.92 to 15.99m. Suffice to say these are just official figures on the formal
sector as, no doubt, millions more are not captured.
The NBS noted that
most affected are the youths, fresh graduates of ages 15 and 24 and older
graduates of ages 25 and 34.
It has been globally
demonstrated, that the way out for nations is to inspire job creation through
self employment rather than have millions marching the streets for non
available white collar jobs, but matters are not helped here by the educational
curricula that pay little or no premium to technical and vocational skills,
unlike in Asia, Europe and America where emphases in poly technical knowledge
enables tens of millions of cottage, small and medium scale industrial and
commercial enterprises which form the life wire of the advanced economies.
The difficulty in
Nigeria is compounded by the stifling business and investment credit system
that disconnects with the people and encumbers enterprise. Even when credit
schemes have been initiated, they have ended up as mere tools for political
patronage and conduits for corruption.
Courtesy: Fred Edoreh
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