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