The future is the youth, but how true is this?

 

A recent report by the National Bureau of Statistics goaded me to write this article. It’s a sad commentary that 14 years after our country returned to civil rule, the issue of youth employment has remained intractable and gradually, a strong army of unemployed youths is building up, yet our leaders are not truly concerned about the development.

Coming back to the NBS report on the job creation, it seems most of the government policies on employment generation are designed to fail in the first instance and perhaps, meant to hoodwink the populace to think the government is doing something to alleviate poverty in the land. Yet, enormous resources are being diverted to feather the personal nest of political office holders.

Today, millions of Nigerian youths are roaming the street in search of jobs that are not there and where there are openings, the majority of them are not employable due to the poor quality of their education. We shall come back to that shortly, but the unemployment situation in the country today has reached a crisis point because government at all levels is not really tackling the menace from the roots. Rather, it is contented in embarking on more of showmanship to give a semblance of solving the situation and satisfying its political agenda.

Officially, the unemployment rate has grown geometrically from around 7.5 per cent in 1999 to above 20 per cent by 2010 and rapidly accelerating by the first quarter of 2013.

But independent figures put the real unemployment rate at something over 40 per cent, which is alarming considering the flaunted rapid growth in the economy in the last couple of years.

According to the NBS report on the economy in the first quarter of 2013, the nation’s Gross Domestic Product grew at 6.6 per cent, while it is projected to grow at around 7.0 per cent by the end of the year. This is a signal that the economy is one of the fastest growing globally, but the impact of such a growth remains invisible among the populace. More people are jobless, and more Nigerians are not able to feed well despite the huge resources accruing to the country. Besides, the state of infrastructure development remains abysmal, poverty is growing at an alarming rate and the political leaders are getting richer daily.

No doubt, the growing insecurity in the country can be traced to the large army of unemployed youths and the high level of poverty in the land.

Boko Haram insurgency, cases of kidnapping and armed robbery across the country are all symptoms of a growing number of idle hands in the country.

One of the major causes of unemployment is the surge in the number of graduates churned out from our tertiary institutions every year without a commensurate capacity in the labour market to absorb them.

There are stories of many university graduates who could not get employment after more than five years of leaving school while many of them have resorted to doing menial jobs for survival.

However, the real issue behind the growing graduate unemployment in the country could be located in the employability status of many of the products of our higher institutions.

In a recent observation, Mrs. Fola Ogunsola, chief executive of Finesse Vacations & Logistics Limited and founder of Fola Ogunsola Foundation, said, “The bulk of the products of our universities have been found to be unemployable due to skill gap and ill-preparation for the real task ahead in the market place.”

Surely, Ogunsola is in a position to know this, because apart from being an employer of labour, she had in the last couple of years embarked on a noble cause to correct some of the skill gaps noticeable in the output of our universities through retraining and empowerment initiatives of her foundation.

What should be uppermost in the minds of policymakers is the need to review the curriculum of our universities to reflect the needs in the marketplace and prepare the products for the challenges ahead.

Historically, our institutions of higher learning were designed to feed the public service and the then growing commerce industry with manpower without taking into cognisance the changing world and economy. Today, the civil service can no longer contain the number of graduates produced by our higher institutions, while the composition and nature of the economy have changed considerably from what they used to be, thereby rendering the products from the tertiary institutions useless.

The need to eradicate courses that are not relevant to the requirement in the workplace is becoming more urgent, while emphasis should be placed on producing well-grounded graduates that are capable of holding their own in the market-place.

According to a research note by Prof. Mike Obadan and Ayodele Odusola of the National Centre for Economic Management and Administration, “Nigeria will have no prospect of measurable development or of improving the welfare of its people, unless it enhances the chances of employment for its university graduates.”

The first step towards enhancing the employability of graduates of Nigerian universities is not in the vote-catching policy like YOUWIN as being pursued by President Goodluck Jonathan nor in the OYES programme by the Osun State Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, which are mere palliatives to address the issue of high level of unemployment, but lack the depth to fully tackle the menace in the longer term.

Also, the concentration of efforts in establishing new universities in all the geopolitical zones without addressing the fundamental flaws in our educational system will only compound the problem of unemployment and employability of the outputs of the institutions.

Government at all levels should refocus the educational policy towards building self-sufficient, self-motivated and self-employable citizens rather than the greater concentration on paper qualifications; the focus should be on building a total man.

The consequence of not investing rightly in the educational development of the youths is unimaginable.

Much of the flaunting growth in the economy as measured by the GDP is simply due to higher earnings from crude oil export; this is the time for the government to expand the economic base from a mono-cultural one to a more diverse one to create more opportunities for many jobless youths in the country. The discovery of shale gas deposit by the United States will soon put to an end Nigeria’s reliance on earnings from oil export to support the economy. It therefore behooves on the government and the entire citizenry to encourage rapid investment in other sectors of the economy, which apart from generating employment for the teeming unemployed youths, will also save the country from economic recession.