Desperate Times, Desperate Solutions

Sometime ago, 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 on 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 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 a conservative 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?
About two years ago, 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. While still in office, the immediate past Finance Minister, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, declared that the high unemployment rate was causing her sleepless nights. I believe the minister wasn’t alone in experiencing the nightmare. Several Nigerians do as well.
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 have taken advantage of the situation to defraud helpless job seekers by extorting money from them in the guise of paying for application forms.
It is time for the president and state governors to do something about the high rate of joblessness in the country. They must fulfill their various campaign promises to provide jobs for youths. If they fail, then it will be obvious that those promises were mere deceit to win election.
Truly, we are in desperate times. Desperate times require desperate solutions. If this peril is not contained as quickly as possible, we must all prepare to pay the price as jobless youths are recruited into the army of oil thieves, insurgents, militants, kidnappers, and murderers and, of course, armed robbers? Indeed, we shall have no hiding place.

Arnold Alalibo