TACKLING YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT  

Government economic plans must prioritise youth employment

Unless the relevant authorities do something critical and urgent about the astronomical rise in unemployment levels, particularly among the youths, Nigeria may be sitting on a time bomb waiting to explode. Figures available paint a dire situation of millions of Nigerian youths roaming the streets looking for work but finding none. As Nigerians await President Bola Tinubu’s cabinet and the direction of his economic programme, one issue that must be uppermost in his mind is how to tackle this challenge. And it would require a bold agenda beyond the tokenism of previous administrations.  

In April, KPMG, a global audit and tax advisory firm, projected that unemployment rate in Nigeria will rise from 37.7 per cent in 2022 to 40.6 per cent this year.  “Unemployment is expected to continue to be a major challenge in 2023 due to the limited investment by the private sector, low industrialisation, and slower than required economic growth and consequently the inability of the economy to absorb the four – five million new entrants into the Nigerian job market every year”, according to its International Global Economic Outlook report. That was before the removal of subsidy in the downstream sector of the petroleum industry which has impacted negatively on millions of Nigerians.  

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has over the years confirmed a consistent pattern of worsening unemployment in the country. More dangerous is the fact that more than 50 per cent of that army of idle citizens is peopled by those between the ages of 15 and 35. The most disturbing part is that the figures revealed a clear pattern of failure of government policies aimed at dealing with the challenge. Worse still is that there is no evidence to suggest that the authorities in Abuja and the 36 states appreciate the gravity of the situation nor are there plans to deal with it.  

The clear and present danger of such a high level of idleness among young persons are already manifest in the level of strife and crimes in virtually every corner of the country. Whereas the multitude of violent outbursts might have religious and ethnic colorations and undertones it is a notorious fact that most of the people in the fields and trenches of war are youths who if otherwise meaningfully engaged would have been unavailable for those worthless anti-social endeavours. Some of the factors responsible for this situation include a growing population amid declining financial resources, predominant production of primary goods over finished products, aging public infrastructure and opaque systems of governance. In several parts of the country where farming is the main occupation, the incessant violence on communities by terrorists have made the profession a serious hazard.   

No doubt, the unemployment challenge is directly linked with the ill-health of the economy.  

Government economic recovery plan, therefore, must prioritise youth employment and formulate policies to reduce it to the barest minimum. In the past, the federal government had economic empowerment programmes specifically targeted at young persons, including YouWin, Graduate Internship, etc. Whatever undermined those programmes should be reviewed and appropriate measures taken to improve and make them more efficient to achieve their objectives.  

Of more fundamental imperative, however, is the urgent need to realign the nation’s educational curriculum with the needs of the economy. It has been said with some measure of justification that many of the school leavers are unemployable regarding their training and skills. It has become necessary therefore that our educational training curriculum at all levels must incorporate skills acquisition and entrepreneurial development so that graduates leave school with the capacity to create wealth and jobs rather than seeking jobs.  

There is no doubt that President Tinubu has his job cut out for him.