The idea looks great on paper with the massive unemployment rate where the youth unemployment rate is recording excess of 55%. Yes, I can start a website and help young people find jobs. But remember: the biggest challenge is finding jobs for people in a place with no jobs. Nigeria’s unemployment problems will not be solved with recruitment-focused apps or websites but by creating growing companies of the future. Tell those governors that having dedicated websites for employers to post jobs for the youth will not fix any issue. They just need to provide enabling environment to help companies do their things: put factors of production to work, and create jobs!
Nigeria is yet to recover FULLY from the Great Recession of 2008. While many continue to look at the stock market for signs, the sign that matters is evident – we are losing a generation of young people on acute sustained unemployment. Yes, ‘Youth unemployment and underemployment was 55.4% in third quarter of 2018, leaving more than half of the country’s largely youthful population idle most of the time.’ Look at the trajectory of the proportion of full-time youth employment – not a good pattern!
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It’s part of growing the services sector, with nothing to service anyway. Look around, all the supposed economic activities hover around the intangibles, and at the end of the day, you realise that the needle hasn’t moved an inch.
We are very good at creating problems to solve problems, if you know what that means. So it’s either you see websites and apps for aggregating and matching applicants to job opportunities, or you have training programmes and CV clinics; all in an economy with little or no jobs!
As if people’s predicament isn’t bad enough, they rake vulnerable people to religious houses, and then ask them to sow seeds, in order to get job; all happening in your wretchednedness. Or you are told that someone is blocking the favour coming to you, so you need to break the yoke! In all this confusion, no one has looked at the economy, the real cause of those phantom misfortunes.
It is not by creating apps, websites or payment platforms that you grow the economy, these things are useful only when there is something to be traded. If you are not producing, all other efforts are marginal.
Maybe we know what we want, but yet to understand how we want it or how to get it. The ‘enabling environment’, who knows the meaning?
I think in Nigeria, leaders need to be a little MORE honest. We cannot appear to be doing something positive when we know it will have no impact. Remember the former governor who created Task Force on jobs. But at the end, there were no jobs for the youth. We need to provide electricity, etc. Jobs will take care of themselves.
Awesome read, Thanks