Time to Work

By Msonter Anzaa

No fewer than 18 people lost their lives at the weekend during the “recruitment test” organized by the Nigerian Immigration Service, NIS, when a stampede erupted at the National Stadium, Abuja. At least 70 others were admitted at the National Hospital, Abuja for various degrees of injuries.

I marvel at the sheer size of that crowd. I think that even if the “recruitment exercise” was not “conducted” in any other state of the federation, the available space would still not serve all the applicants. But as we know, similar-sized crowds were witnessed across the 36 states of the federation. No matter how large the NIS is, it cannot recruit all those people, except if it were to just sew uniforms, throw them at the crowds and ask everyone to start marching to the border. With such an intimidating hungry-man – in fact, angry-man - population, Nigeria is ripening for another security disaster of Boko-Haramic proportions. Unemployment is no longer a matter of economics alone; it is a matter of national security. I want to observe with all respect that what happened across the country last Saturday was no where near a recruitment exercise. It was a laboratory test to determine whether desperation, frustration and potential trouble exist in this country. And as we now know, the results were all positive.

Why are there so many unemployed youth in Nigeria? The summary of the answer is failure, not only of government, but also of state. We know that our education is still not on its feet. We are often told by the experts how well our economy is doing, but we know we are not doing well as a people. We are in a state of national crisis. Since all these “applicants” possess a kind of certificate education, isn’t it an inditement on our education that they are not able to survive without “government work”? 

Avoiding the Abuja shame begins when a child starts kindergarten. Any educational system has sufficient time to convert the child either to a disillusioned job seeker or a fulfilled job provider. Let us once and for all, give our education the attention it needs. In addition to the infrastructure which I hope will soon be in place, we need to restructure our curriculum, to aim at producing graduates with skills to meet immediate national manpower and technical needs. Let us task our universities to go into research and create innovations that focus on solving our problems as a nation. We may not be able to go to space like the West – we don’t need that in any case – but we can try to produce what we consume. At the moment, our markets are filled with all kinds of rechargeable lamps imported from other countries. The patronage of such lamps is quite huge. We need not import them, since our electrical electronics engineering graduates should be able to produce them. Consider the number of jobs we would create if we produced those lamps by ourselves. Different people would be engaged in sourcing the raw materials, transporting, processing, and assembling them, and then selling the lamps to users.

It is not as if such technical knowledge does not already exist. Even where it exists, there is the problem of sponsorship. A number of initiatives are in place to avail funds to such projects, but these are not enough. We should disband all these multiple initiatives, and create once and for all, a National Youth Innovation Fund, NYIF, to which government, the private sector and our development partners will contribute. Any individual who develops an idea that can solve our problems and create jobs will apply for assistance from the NYIF. The NYIF will evaluate the idea to determine its viability, assist with further organization where necessary and provide the needed loan for commercialization of the project.

We also need to plan adequately for our youth. How many children are born per year? How many are of school age per year? What are we teaching them in school? Given what they are studying, where will they fit in the economy of the nation when they graduate? Do such opportunities really exist? How can we create them? This will save us the embarrassment of throwing our palms open and simply lamenting that “these people are too many” as if they are not our citizens but refugees who just happened to be here – people we didn’t know were going to come.

There is no excuse whatsoever, for what happened this Saturday to repeat itself in this country in the next ten years. We have for too long shied away from our duty to this nation. The developed countries that we admire did not become developed through luck; they did by taking conscious decisions that paid off in the long run. This is time to work.

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