Averting Unemployment Time Bomb

Titled “Of Roads Less Travelled: Assessing the Potential for Migration to Provide Overseas Jobs for Nigeria’s Youths”, a new World Bank report recently published with support from the Korea World Bank Partnership Facility (KWPF) and the Rapid Social Response (RSR) trust funds has again highlighted the country’s current unemployment crisis as one of the worst in recent times, noting that the situation has led to an astronomical increase in the number of Nigerians seeking asylum and refugee status in other countries, within the last 10 years.
Between 2010 and 2020, the World Bank estimated that the unemployment rate rose five-fold, from 6.4 per cent in 2020, with the rates being particularly acute since the 2015/2016 economic recession and further worsened as Covid -19 led to the worst recession in four decades in 2020.
“Nigeria’s facing one of the most acute jobless crisis in recent times. Between 2014 and 2020, Nigeria’s working population grew from 102 million to 122 million, growing at an average rate of approximately 3 per cent per year.
“Similarly, Nigeria’s active labour force population, that is, those willing and able to work among the working age population, grew from 73 million in 2014 to 90 million in 2018, adding 17.5 million new entrants to Nigeria’s active labour force.
“Since 2018, however, the active labour force population has dramatically decreased to around 70 million – lower than the level in 2014 – while the number of Nigerians who are in the working-age population but not active in the labour force has increased from 29 million to 52 million between 2014 and 2020.
“The expanding working-age population combined with scarce domestic employment opportunities is creating high rates of unemployment, particularly for Nigeria’s youth”, the report noted.
According to the bank, the number of international migrants from Nigeria has increased three fold since 1990, growing from 446,806 in 1990 to 1,438,331 in 2019 while the number of persons coming into Nigeria from outside has been relatively stagnant in the decade under consideration.
“An important trend that is observed in the data is the rise in the number of refugees and asylum seekers from Nigeria. The share of refugees and asylum seekers from Nigeria has increased drastically in last decade, growing from 27,557 in 2010 to 408,078 in 2019”, it said.
The Tide cannot but observe that within the period under review, the country has also witnessed a phenomenal rise in such crimes as economic sabotage, kidnapping for ransom, banditry, cultism, militancy and related tendencies have snowballed into heightened generalised insecurity, including insurgency and separatist agitations. Economic and social insecurity, direct derivatives of unemployment have been on a steady rise in Nigeria mainly due to ineffective economic policies, bad politics, mismanagement, unbridled endemic corruption and failure of leadership.
There is no gainsaying the fact that Nigeria’s economic woes will only go from bad to worse and never come out of the dark alley as long as the fight against corruption is prosecuted with more rhetorics than stern, decisive action as is the case today. The Federal Government must do more to mobilise and galvanise all sectors, sections and interests and approach the anti-corruption war with sincerity of purpose, integrity and unimpeachable commitment to the overriding national interest to make significant impact that will minimise the cancerous affliction of the nation and free up funds for needed developmental efforts.
The time has also come for the central government to muster the political will to take another look at some of its economic policies that have not yielded desired results so far. For instance, it is crystal clear that the policy that hands out meagre stipends to individuals without productively engaging them has neither moved the economy of the country any further nor has it achieved any significant milestone towards sustainable economic stability for the recipients. Clearly, the President needs to infuse fresh ideas into the economic management of the country by reworking his economic advisory team.
A critical sector at the heart of economic revival and engagement of the labour force is the productive sector. Nigeria is today considered more of a consuming nation than a producing economy. This state of affairs only produces jobs for other countries while draining our resources. No effort should be spared to halt and reverse this trend if our country is to avert the time bomb that the massive army of able but idle population represents.
Without further delay, the much-touted diversification of the economy must be pursued with vigour while the attention on agriculture should be given a boost to make it deliver on its potential as a veritable employer of labour and alternative revenue earner for the nation.
The focus on infrastructural development needs to take a more aggressive dimension to drive the manufacturing sector. The perennial power problem in the country must be fixed to give impetus to industrialisation.
Finally, deliberate efforts must be made to engender good governance and the rule of law to attract and retain the confidence of both local and foreign investors. The Federal Government must quickly role out a holistic plan that will diffuse this unemployment time bomb before it explodes and plunge our country into deeper crisis with catastrophic consequences for national stability.