With global unemployment projected to reach over 215 million by 2018, experts fear that Africa, particularly Nigeria’s share of the global scourge might increase disproportionately, with attendant unsavoury consequences unless the country immediately adopts pro-active and holistic approach to halt the rising youth unemployment, writes Asst. Editor CHIKODI OKEREOCHA
As his surname suggests, Akintunde Maberu, a Lagos-based finance and investment consultant, should be a courageous man. In fact, his surname, ‘Maberu’, in Yoruba language, literarily means ‘do not be afraid’. But these days, Maberu is afraid. He fears that Nigeria might be sitting on a keg of gunpowder on account of rising unemployment rate in the country, particularly among the youths.
Statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show that Nigeria’s unemployment rate rose from 21.1 per cent in 2010 to 23.9 per cent in 2011. The labour force swelled by 2.1 million to 67,256,090 people, with just 51,224,115 persons employed, leaving 16,074,205 people without jobs. Insufficient jobs resulted in additional 2.1 million unemployed persons in 2011, up from 1.5 million in 2010, even as Nigeria’s population, according to NBS, grew by 3.2 per cent in 2011, from 159.3 million people in 2010 to 164.4 million in 2011.
NBS however, added that, “Unemployment was higher in the rural areas, at 25.6 per cent, than in the urban areas, where it was 17 per cent on average.” NBS however, admonished that in the light of the country’s fast-growing population, there is need to double efforts at creating a conducive environment for job creation in order to reverse the trend. Therein lies Maberu’s fears. He told The Nation that “government is yet to come up with conscientious and people-oriented policies targeted at getting millions of unemployed Nigerian youths actively and meaningfully engaged.”
While noting that “unemployment remains one of the major concerns in the country today,” the renowned finance analyst and stockbroker dismissed current Federal Government’s programmes aimed at creating jobs as “mere propaganda.” He argued that reversing the trend of rising youth unemployment must start from the nation’s education sector, which he said must be overhauled along the line of skills acquisition. Hear him: “Nigeria’s education curriculum should be immediately revised to incorporate entrepreneurial skills and enterprise development. This would adequately horn the entrepreneurial skills of Nigerian youths.
The idea, Maberu explained, is that with adequate skills and hands-on experience in various vocations, Nigerian graduates would be self employed after leaving school while those in school would find something doing even before completing their education. He said that this would save Nigerian youths the stress and trauma of endless and fruitless search for paid employments in a highly saturated labour market. The approach, according to him, has become even more necessary considering the fact that many Nigerian graduates are unemployable.
Maberu also took a swipe at the structure of Nigeria’s civil service which, according to him, is not structured in a way that allows qualified youths take up vacant positions left by retired civil servants in an open and transparent manner. While conceding that indeed, few employment opportunities exist in the country, he however, expressed regrets that the few job openings in various government ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), unlike in the past, are no longer openly advertised. “When was the last time you saw job advertisements in the papers by any of the MDAs?” he asked, adding, “you hardly see advertisements for jobs these days, and until there is a progressive shift from bottom up, allowing civil servants in MDAs to genuinely retire and make room for the younger ones instead of reserving those jobs for their cronies, the rising unemployment trend in the country may never be reversed.”
Maberu argued that the need for more concerted and holistic efforts to reverse the rising youth unemployment has become even more necessary considering the grim picture painted recently of the global unemployment market by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). ILO projected that global unemployment would hit over 215 million by 2018. The organisation in its ‘Global Employment Trends 2014’ noted that the uneven economic recovery and successive downward revisions in economic growth projections have had an impact on the global employment situation with the result that about 202 million people were unemployed in 2013 around the world.
The figure, according to ILO, is an increase of almost 5 million compared with the year before, reflecting the fact that employment is not expanding sufficiently fast to keep up with the growing labour force. ILO said the bulk of the increase in global unemployment is in the East Asia and South Asia regions, which together represent more than 45 per cent of additional jobseekers, followed by Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. Latin America, by contrast, added fewer than 50,000 additional unemployed to the global number – or around 1 per cent of the total increase in unemployment in 2013.
ILO said overall, the crisis-related global jobs gap that has opened up since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, over and above an already large number of jobseekers, continues to widen. “In 2013, this gap reached 62 million jobs, including 32 million additional jobseekers, 23 million people that became discouraged and no longer look for jobs and 7 million economically inactive people that prefer not to participate in the labour market. … and on current trends, it would rise by a further 13 million people by 2018,” ILO projected. It also said that if current trends continue, “global unemployment is set to worsen further, albeit gradually, reaching more than 215 million jobseekers by 2018.” During this period, around 40 million net new jobs would be created every year, which is less than the 42.6 million people that are expected to enter the labour market every year.
ILO however, said that young people continue to be particularly affected by the weak and uneven recovery. “It is estimated that some 74.5 million young people – aged 15–24 – were unemployed in 2013; that is almost 1 million more than in the year before. The global youth unemployment rate has reached 13.1 per cent, which is almost three times as high as the adult unemployment rate….,” the report said. In all, ILO says that tackling the employment and social gaps requires job-friendly macroeconomic policies. The report said that a rebalancing of macroeconomic policies and increased labour incomes would significantly improve the employment outlook.
Although, the ILO report did not place Sub-Saharan Africa, by extension, Nigeria, among those that would account for the bulk of the increase in global unemployment, the situation in Africa is quite worrisome, particularly with regards to youth unemployment. According to the ILO, 3 out of 5 unemployed people in Africa are young people. There are 200 million people in Africa between 15 and 24 years of age, representing about 20 per cent of the population. The continent is said to have the fastest growing and most youthful population in the world. Over 40 per cent of its population is under 15. Africa’s high fertility rate is said to be responsible for this.
Indeed, in Africa, youth unemployment has become a threat to socio-economic peace and stability. For instance, unemployment rate in South Africa increased to 25.20 per cent in the first quarter of 2013 from 24.90 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2012. Kenya’s reached an all time high of 40.0 per cent in December 2011, while Ghana, Nigeria’s close neighbour, had an unemployment rate of 11 per cent in 2012. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, has 23.9 per cent unemployment rate, with youth unemployment rate estimated at over 50 percent.
Experts however, say that the unemployment figure for Nigeria might be higher considering the unavailability of reliable data in the country. Some experts argue that given Nigeria’s penchant for poor record keeping, the figure could be as high as 37.7 per cent. Besides, over one million graduates are churned out annually by well over 300 universities, polytechnics and colleges of education in Nigeria, with many people expressing fears that the country’s economy is at moment not robust enough to absorb even 20 per cent of the products of the institutions.
As if to make matters worse, more companies, in a bid to cut cost, are downsizing their workforce thus sending thousands of their employees back to the labour market. The banking sector appears to be worse hit following a sack gale that has shown many bank workers the door while keeping others on edge. The telecoms sector is also hit as telecoms companies are laying off their workers after out-sourcing most of their operations. Many of the workers who have been sacked are bread winners and their lives and that of their families and dependants are now hanging on the balance.
The increasing rate of unemployment in the country is seen by experts as confirmation that Nigeria’s widely reported rapid economic growth has evidently failed to translate into job creation. For instance, Prof Pat Utomi, Director, Lagos Business School, has never stopped wondering why Nigeria experiences rising rate of unemployment despite its rating as one of the fastest growing economies in the world, a situation said to be no different in six other African countries listed among the 10 fastest growing economies in the world.
Prof Akpan Ekpo, Director-General, West African Institute for Financial and Economic Management (WAIFEM), is no less worried, noting that in Nigeria, despite the ‘healthy growth’ of the economy in the last five years (averaging almost 7 per cent), unemployment has been rising alongside the increased incidence of poverty. He described the country’s rising unemployment as “a looming time bomb and a national crisis.”
Ekpo is right. The rising violent crimes and the widespread insecurity across the country, many people believe, is largely traceable to the rising unemployment in the last couple of years. Today, kidnapping, advance fee fraud, otherwise called 419, armed robbery, prostitution, cultism, drug and child trafficking, among others, have become daily occurrences. A new and scary dimension has since been added to these social ills following the upsurge in violent campaigns by terrorist groups, particularly the dreaded Boko Haram insurgents. Many Nigerian youths, for lack of paid employments, have become ready recruits into terrorist organisations, a development that confirms fears that the country is indeed, seating on a keg of gunpowder.
But government says it is not folding its arms and that it is making progress in reversing the rising trend of unemployment. For instance, the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, disclosed recently that the YouWin programme, an acronym for Youth Enterprise with Innovation in Nigeria, which seeks to support thousands of youth entrepreneurs to grow their businesses and create jobs for other youths, has so far created close to 20, 000 jobs. About 2, 400 winners are said to have emerged from the first two rounds of the unique business plan competition, coordinated by the Federal Ministry of Finance, along with the Ministries of Communications Technology and Youth Development. Government is also making progress in job creation through the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P) through which it hopes to create about 370,000 jobs– which experts say are, at best, mere drops in the ocean. They therefore, argue that a more pro-active, comprehensive and honest approach must be fashioned out to stop the rising unemployment scourge. The thinking is that with an ever increasing youth population who have no jobs, it is only a matter of time before Nigeria erupts into a serious crisis. Whether government would act decisively to starve off the impending crisis remains to be seen.
