Unemployability Index and Other Matters

By Okey Ikechukwu

Now, that’s a new one wouldn’t you say? But bear with me and come along. We know of the employment index. We also know of the unemployment index. There is then, again, the underemployment index. These indices have become convenient devices for masking a frightening democratic fact, namely that we ought to also take inventory of that active, perhaps too active, part of our population that is absolutely unemployable. But can someone really be absolutely unemployable?

We speak of the employed as people who are engaged in some type of employ, for wages or profit. They may be working for an individual, an organization or for themselves. The unemployed would be generally taken to be “those who have nothing doing”. But that is incorrect, in my view. A person may have nothing doing out of choice. So, the unemployed should strictly refer to those with some skill or capacity for which they could earn pay or make profit, but which is not put to use; even though such parsons are able, willing and available to be employed or deployed. As for the underemployed, it is perhaps best to explain that with a telling example.

Imagine that you spent six years to obtain a university degree in architecture. Imagine also that you are willing and ready to either work in an architectural firm, or open up your own practice. Imagine, further, that you have no way of doing either for two reasons. The first reason is that there is no architectural firm willing and able to hire you. The second reason is that even if you would like to set up your own firm, you are not able to do so. So, there you are starving. You cannot buy soap for a bath or fend for yourself in any way. Fortunately, you run into a friend who knows of a vacancy in a small hotel, which needs a receptionist. You jump at the job, lest you perish.

You are then underemployed in two distinct senses. In the first sense your capacities completely outclasses every demand the hotel will ever make of you as a receptionist. In the second sense, the hotel does not even have enough room, or human traffic, to task just your ability to be awake and alert in the hotel’s front office. 

As for the underemployed, they are simply too many today. They range from graduates who cannot find what to do, to artisans and workmen whose skills are not being sought by a weather-beaten populace that is writhing in economic anguish and gnashing of teeth.

As for the unemployable, they include graduates and non-graduates. A student who obtains a university degree by paying his teachers from start to the point of graduation cannot be employed for anything in his field of study. If, in addition, he also did not acquire any vocational skills, or even develop muscles in order to serve as a bouncer or load bearing tout in the market, then he is truly finished. Such a person must be “retooled” for value, or he will remain eternally useless to the society – and also to himself -in terms of engaging meaningfully in his immediate and remote economic environment. But he can be a criminal, because of the low entry requirement.

Let us leave the university graduates and such others and look at the graduates of the Almajiri school system. Many observers and commentators make the mistake of saying that Qur’anic education is useless; and that graduates of the system are useless dullards and that it should be abolished. These claims and assumptions can be traced to a misunderstanding of the real challenge facing products of this system. To begin with many graduates of the Almajiri system prove their intelligence, measured as the ability to memorize and reproduced presented data the way it is done in the average classroom in the Western educational system, by scriptural recitations, etc. 

What they lack is the tools with which they can engage meaningfully, and also at the level of values. Without economic survival skills, in terms of the ability to provide goods or services that could earn them income, they remain a troublesome demographic group to any development planner. They need to be retooled at two levels: the economic and the axiological. But the axiological is a matter for another day.

Our limited intention here is simply to show that the ignored unemployability index is not readily acknowledged in clear terms and it not being planned for. Yes, there are government “empowerment programmes” and job creation agencies and platforms. But is anyone tracking their impact or trajectory in real terms? Is anyone relating the number of people they reportedly empowered economically to the unemployment figures? Is anyone tracking job losses and juxtaposing them against claims about job creation, to be sure they are not all cancelling out each other? Just asking. 

It would seem that not much will change around here in the short term. If anything, matters are likely to get much worse, before they get any better. The security situation is not getting better, but let us hope that the 8-point Agenda will do something about that. I am not sure how; as oil theft is still thriving and poverty is walking the land; and holding hands with fuel price hike and rampaging rise in food prices. 

The facts staring us in the face today, for which the blame does not necessarily lie with the three months old government, include the following: “ (1) The problem of increasing national productivity in the face of insecurity and other negative factors; (2) The prevalence of consumption patterns and product preferences that negatively impact Nigeria’s Balance of Trade, especially from the angle of accruing deficits, (3) The fact that the Nigerian State, and the political and economic elite, consume mostly what they do not produce and are not in a hurry to change; (4) The tendency to mistake policy statements and records of expenditure for positive impact on lives, and (5) The challenges of an operating environment that flagrantly undermines the best policy initiatives and economic intervention programmes. 

All things considered, and taking us back to our subject matter for today, unemployable Nigerians have become an absolute majority today. This includes intelligent graduates who actually studied for, and got, their academic qualifications. Their “unemployability” stems from a moral handicap. In their education, socialization and engagements, they internalized the wrong values about leadership, public office, service delivery and much more. If you “employ” them to manage the common till, via an electoral process, they go there to serve their personal interests. Thus, they are a danger to the state and are the wrong mentors for those coming after them.

See what unemployability has morphed into? So, look around you again and answer this question: Is it correct to say that the major crisis facing the Nigerian State today is the failure to work out, and be guided by, the unemployability index in everything it is doing today? Just asking.

Values create the right mindset for substantive citizenship, rather than nominal citizenship. In our New World Order, wherein anyone with a cell phone and a social media handle is automatically a media owner, broadcaster, Editor-in-Chief and even a television station, we need a rallying call for a gathering of wits. But who will make the call? Who is making it? Who even thinks that such a call is necessary?

The issues and problems raised here demand some reflection. Other issues not raised here are also alive and well. Some are cheerfully mutating, and not disappearing. Many more are even popping out of every street corner as I write. That is why weariness walks the land. But let the weary not thump their chests and point fingers. The space is being progressively taken over by aggrieved indigenes – not citizens – who are withholding loyalty from the Nigerian State. This is perhaps understandable when we consider that, in many cases, we have official marauders and state-decorated insurgents passing themselves off as leaders and statesmen. 

As observed on this page, under “The Call for Authenticity” nearly a year ago, “Inauthenticity walks the land! In Aso Rock, in the National Assembly, in the judiciary, in state government houses, in state Houses of Assembly, in local government headquarters, in churches and mosques, in institutions of higher and lower learning. We walk through a maze and claim to be walking under bright lights. Debauchery has been given a new name, in the hope that the discerning will no longer keep watch over disappearing values. No, the relevant eyes are still wide open, even if fewer in number than hitherto. The call for authenticity is real”. Enough said!

NIPR Gets a New President

Last week, Dr Ike Neliaku emerged the new President of the Nigerian Institute of Public relations. It was a victory well deserved and for an organization that he has tirelessly helped to build and nurture for so long.

Always in the background and almost desperate not to be seen, Ike has been the backbone of some of the most highly celebrated and successful national events. He has worked in government at the highest levels, but has never focused on anything else that adding value to the nation and to his principals. Ask any former minister about him and you will always get the same nostalgic and grateful note in the voice as they speak of a man without whom they would not really have had a meaningful tenure.

Ike was central to the conception, and successful execution, of the recent NIPR powered Nigeria Citizens Summit that moved from the Zonal Level to a well-attended Grand Finale in Abuja. In all of that, he was only concerned about ensuring that every demographic group and stakeholder platform had visibility, representation and voice. Those that were not forthcoming were approached specially. Ike’s argument in all instances was consistent: “We are not complete if we are not complete. The very idea of inclusivity in national discourse implies the absence of observers, of whatever coloration. So, those who have not said anything should be specially briefed on the subject matters on the table and their input taken”.

Need I say anything from the personal angle. I had better not. We leave it a this: NIPR has got the good man it deserves at a time like this.