The level of unemployment in Nigeria
today is too alarming and should
immediately engage the attention of
those in power before its dire
consequencies consume the country.
Low crude oil and gas output and their
prices, sliding foreign reserve of
Nigeria, high foreign exchange rate,
dwindling revenue accruals to the
national treasury, inflation and
negative economic growth have all
combined to make production
impossible and firing of employees,
instead of hiring, the new order.
Corruption and mismanagement of the
nation’s resources in the period of
boom, of course, played a part.
However, the current unprecedentedly
high level of unengaged workforce
should be properly addressed with
appropriate policies and investments
by the government.
It is more worrisome because the
largest segment of the population
caught in this conundrum is the youth
whose frustrations and juvenile
propensities have often propelled them
into unwholesome and criminal social
vices like kidnapping, robbery, rape,
bigotry and militancy. These are
consequent vices Nigeria does not
need to add to its already full plate of
challenges.
Certainly, the galloping trend of
unemployment from one regime to
another has indicted governments,
agencies, parastatals and ministries in
which trust has been reposed over the
years.
According to the Nigerian Bureau of
Statistics, the country’s unemployment
rate was 12.1 per cent in the first
quarter of 2016, up from 10.4 per cent
in the fourth quarter of 2015, reaching
the highest since December 2001. To
forestall the necessity of a civil crisis
arising from this unprecedented
scourge, it is imperative for the
government to proclaim a state of
emergency and tackle the problem
head-on.
Already, nerves are frayed all over the
country as a result of poor conditions
of living. Poverty is at its most abject.
But corruption, even in jobs
placement, compound issues. Recently,
about 2000 candidates earlier
recruited, trained but later dumped by
the Nigeria Immigration Services (NIS)
blocked the main entrance to the
presidential villa, Abuja, in protest.
Instead of admitting tardiness and
unaccountability on the part of his
agency, the Comptroller-General of
Immigration in reaction to the protest
said “the 2000 officers were not
officially recruited in the first place.
What actually happened was that they
were assisted by a presidential
committee on recruitment, but the
committee did not pass through due
process before the issuance of
appointment letters”. This is a classic
case of the corruption that the search
for unavailable jobs has bred.
There have also been corrupt practices
in recruitment into the Nigeria Police
Force, where over 115 applicants are
soon to be prosecuted for alteration or
forgery of documents. The bitter lesson
for the nation from these episodes is
that jobs may even exist without the
parastatals having the moral standing
to administer them fairly and justly, or
corruption pollutes the process of fair
and just recruitment. The government
should therefore look into the
administrative maladies confronting
employment in all critical sectors of
the economy. Even so, how many
people can the governments with all
the agencies, employ? The solution,
therefore, is in a productive
entrepreneurial economy.
Confirming the enormity of the
unemployment scourge, Minister of
Labour and Employment, Chris Ngige,
during the inauguration of a school-to-
work training programme for 150
secondary school pupils in Cross River
State the other day said that the
Federal Government was committed to
the reduction of graduate and non-
graduate unemployment in the
country.
According to him “The Federal
Government is not unaware of the
high level of unemployment in Nigeria.
As part of measures to address it, the
government has designed programmes
and schemes towards skills acquisition
for graduates and non-graduates. This
training programme is meant to equip
the pupils with employability, skills
that would make them self-reliant”.
Such skills, according to the minister
include barbing, phone and computer
repairs and so on. This is good and the
young ones should embrace new
technical skills to enable them fend for
themselves. While this campaign is
laudable, it would nonetheless be
disingenuous to escape into a seeming
cosmetic or fleeting measures in place
of durable structural fixing of the
economy.
There is an overwhelming need for an
urgent structural diversification of the
economy into agriculture, mining and
tourism, an economy in which
entrepreneurship and productivity
replace cosmetic and phantom
employment schemes without value
creation.
The governments at all levels should
address youth employment by
ensuring that agriculture is revived
and made profitable. They should
ensure that skills acquisition by those
willing is well democratised and
encouragement is given to
entrepreneurial ventures. The
problems of energy shortage, poor
quality of education, low agricultural
output and corruption should also be
addressed if the country would ever
succeed in putting people to work. Source: The Guardian
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