Dimensions Of Unemployment

Sometime last year, I
was at the Rivers State University of Science and Technology, RSUST, Port Harcourt, for the convocation ceremony of a cousin. While the ceremony lasted, what went through my mind was entirely different.
I was hoping my cousin truly understood what she was graduating into. I was equally sure she didn’t do a deep reflection on the unemployment situation in Nigeria. If she had, the boundless joy she expressed at the occasion would have been punctuated intermittently.
Each time I think about the unemployment situation in the country, I am often intrigued. I sympathise with those who graduate from higher institutions expecting to get employments that are non-existent. Some of them ask themselves the essence of being graduates when there are no jobs out there.
With a population of over 160 million, endowed with enormous natural resources, Nigeria prides itself as the most populous country in Africa and the second largest economy in the continent. Sadly, however, years of unbridled corruption, mismanagement and waste have hindered economic growth.
Consequently, the nation’s resources are unutilized leading to unemployment and poverty which threatens the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals, MDGs, in the country. Graduate unemployment has become so pronounced in the last few decades that there appears to be no abatement in sight.
The situation is made worse by the upsurge in the output from tertiary institutions and the inelastic absorptive capacity of the labour market for the services of university and polytechnic graduates. Then the job-seeking graduate’s plight is worsened by employers’ demand for years of experience. The poser is how will experience come without first securing a job?
Given the prevailing problem, many persons are under-employed and are paid what I call ‘starvation allowance’. This class of people is still looking for more gainful employment, thus giving no room to the inexperienced job seekers. To worsen the situation, to be employed nowadays one is expected to have a god father commonly referred to as ‘man know man’.
According to a recent World Bank statistics on the unemployment situation in Nigeria, youth unemployment rate is 38 percent, but realistically, 80 percent of Nigerian youths are unemployed, and this includes secondary school graduates who mostly dwell among the rural populace.
Also, records from the National Bureau of Statistics show that 24 percent of labour force is unemployed. This translates to about 40 million Nigerians. And given the fact that the figure goes up every year, there is need for everyone to be concerned.
What, however, complicates the matter is the number of graduates the nation’s universities churn out annually. The figure has been put at 300,000. How can this army of unemployed persons be absorbed when there is no corresponding number of industries in the country and available jobs are hardly enough to absorb the teeming population?
Recently, a federal agency advertised for recruitment and the mammoth crowd that came for interview was beyond control, resulting in the death of some of the applicants. Similarly, another federal agency advertised 25 vacant positions. Because of the incident that occurred at the sister agency, applicants were asked to apply online. In the end, over 125,000 applications were received.
The dimension unemployment has taken in the country is alarming. Recently, the Finance Minister, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, declared that the situation was causing her sleepless nights. I don’t think that the minister is alone in experiencing the nightmare. Several Nigerians do as well.
As it stands now, no one knows how long this situation will continue. In scamming for the very few available jobs, many youths have fallen to the activities of fraudsters. Some of them have been duped or compromised while others have taken recourse to crime. Unfortunately, some government agencies are involved in defrauding helpless job seekers by extorting from them in the guise of paying for application forms.
The President as well as state governors has been assuring Nigerians of improvement in job creation, especially during electioneering. When will those promises be fulfilled or are they mere deceit in order to win elections?
If concerted steps are not taken to end this menace, the results are quite obvious. We must all be prepared to pay the price, as the nation risks the recruitment of jobless youths into the army of oil thieves, insurgents, militants, kidnappers and of course armed robbers. Then we shall have no hiding place.

Arnold Alalibo