The Nation Newspaper

Tag: unemployment

  • Govt should review curriculum to tackle unemployment – Expert

    Lead Strategist of Crescita Consult, Mr Segun Akiode has called for a review of the education curriculum to tackle massive unemployment in the country.

    About 20.3 million Nigerians are unemployed.

    Akiode spoke at the launch of his book titled ‘Corporate Misfit,’ in Alausa, Ikeja, Lagos.

    He lamented that jobs are available but young graduates and job seekers are unemployed because of their inability to fit into a job.

    “They are unsuitable for employment; they are unable to keep a job and are not able to fill the job positions,” he said.

    He noted that employers of labour need to hire regularly but they complain about scarcity of talent in the labour market.

    Akiode, a recruiter, said there is a wide gap between the school and the corporate world. He said it is important for students to have ties with the corporate world while still in school.

    “There must be a link between the school and the corporate world. Young graduates must develop their skills to be employable while they are in school.

    “You should not use the same CV for all jobs; your CV must be suitable for the particular job you are looking for and you must review your CV and make it up to date regularly,” he charged.

    Akiode noted that while students are in school, they must understand what the corporate world is like and must be ready to take responsibility.

    Based on years of experience as a recruiter, Akiode said it is worrisome to find university graduates for available entry level jobs, hence the reason for writing the book which addresses a few of the knowledge, attitude and skill gap among fresh graduates.

    “The book offers fresh graduates and job seekers wise counsel to make better career choices and to help them not to lose their way. The book is about paradigm shifts from the conventional teachings of societal norms about the career and the job search process,” he said.

    Akiode added that the writing of the book was borne out of a cry to deal with the growing concern among employers of labour and recruiters about the state of employability of fresh graduates in Nigeria.

  • Buhari decries 60 per cent youths’ unemployment

    Buhari decries 60 per cent youths’ unemployment

    President Muahammdu Buhari has decried a situation where 60 per cent of the country’s youth population are unemployed.

    He said the revival of industries to engage more youths would get his serious attention the moment he finishes with the 2016 budget preparation.

    Buhari spoke at a dinner he hosted in honor of the visiting Alumni Association of the Indian Defence Services Staff College (DSSC), Wellingon, where he received part of his own military training.

    In a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, the President said: “Very soon, we will sit down to see how we can rehabilitate industries. We will do this in order to clear the problem of unemployment.”

    The President said a situation where 60 per cent of the country’s 64 per cent youth population were unemployed was extremely dangerous for the country.

    Buhari explained that the insecurity in the Northeast, abduction for ransom in the South and the sabotage of the oil industry in the Niger Delta region have one connection or the other with poverty and unemployment.

    “We are meeting after the budget to see how to revive industry and secure the economy,” he assured.

    The delegation was led to the President by the Indian High Commissioner to Nigeria, Mr. Ajjampur  Ghanashyam and it included retired Indian army generals, who were course mates of the President.

     

     

  • ‘We need to address issue of unemployment ‘

    ‘We need to address issue of unemployment ‘

    Mazi Okechukwu Unegbu is Chairman/Chief Executive, Maxifund Investment Plc and former President of the Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria (CIBN). In this interview with Ibrahim Apekhade Yusuf proffers solutions to the address the prevailing economic situation in the country. Excerpts:

    That is your assessment of the economic situation in the country?

    I addressed the same issue you raised now few days ago at a live programme on TV. I did say that yes in the second quarter of 2015, the Gross Domestic Product was 2.57%, whereas at the first quarter, it was 4.2%, which means there is a decline. Remember, it was 7% before and later 6.5% and now 2.57%, which means we’re in a recession. But the CBN governor said it may be in 2016. He was just been modest as far as I’m concerned. In actual fact, we’re in a recession. Economic recession means economic suffering. Nigeria currently is facing economic doldrums. What we have to do is to avoid a situation where Nigeria becomes a very highly depressed economy.

    Thankfully, the government itself is determined to fight corruption, which is good. Fighting insecurity, also good, but it is yet to come out with an economic blueprint and it is difficult for you and me or for any economist to forecast the issue of recession. It is like saying that somebody is going to die in the next minute. It is not possible. But you also know that it is also even a problem when the IMF is calling for Nigeria to even devalue its currency. That is even a crazy idea altogether.

    We have to start now to work on how best to diversify the economy because the economy has been in a mess for the past 20 years. Curiously, nobody was looking at it because we were getting oil money and nobody talked about diversifying. So we’re going to do a lot of work and I believe we can make it so long as we have sincerity of purpose.

    The issue of forex restriction has been hotly debated as one policy that has more negatives than positives. Do you share such sentiments?

    I completely agree. Forex restriction for certain goods is okay. But what they should do is if you allow your currency freedom, what do you have to back it up? For some goods, yes, we support that but for some others, particularly those that help us increase capacity utilisation in the industry, for those areas you don’t restrict them so much so that you ca be able to have something to do. Last week, the lawmakers declared a state of emergency in the labour market because certain restrictions have been targeted at some companies. You don’t need to do that. All those things we can produce here, yes, you can restrict their importation but those ones we cannot produce, particularly industrial raw materials, industrial spare parts and all that, you don’t need to restrict forex to them. You must be able to allow them access to money sufficient for them to produce. But as for making it an open thing, it is not the right thing for the economy.

    The policy was meant to fix the battered foreign reserves. However, some items in the lists have no business being there because they are raw materials. I have nothing against the policy, but the CBN must be cautious not to drive manufacturers to the parallel market. I expect the regulator to be one step ahead of the stakeholders.

    The CBN should always consider the unintended consequences of its actions and must set a band which the naira must not exceed.

    What measures can the government take to turn things around in the short term?

    For me, one of the quickest things the government can do is to see how they can improve on employment. Even if it means getting all these young boys and girls out into the streets for some of them to be removing dirt from the gutter and putting it back and pay them the minimum wage, that’s okay. That can be done because all the money we’re wasting can be ploughed into that.

    It’s so unfortunate that most of the governors are not thinking, they’re just waiting for the money from Abuja, they’re not thinking. The moment you start doing that then you know you’re going to get more taxes coming in and you’re going to get most of us all working and once we’re working, things will start going on.

    So, first and foremost, get these young boys working, diversify the economy by pushing all of them into agriculture. It can be done. In fact, in the blueprint I designed when I wanted to run for office as the governor of Imo State, there we didn’t put anything about waiting for Abuja allocation. We had a marshal plan on how we are going to raise money in the system and we submitted it to our government that look you don’t need to start going to Abuja all the time.

    There are few things you can do to get the economy back on track. Nobody is doing it, we’re all just politicking without thinking of economising, trying to make sure that the economy moves.

    That is why I’m happy with Babatunde Fowler is doing in Abuja. There are certain things that he has started doing that are in the right direction. The moment you and I are captured in the tax net, the economy can start moving.

    The government must get the country working again. The local government areas are idle, they’re not doing nothing just because the state government decides to emasculate them. I think they should be made to work. Once the councils and villages start working, most of us would be persuaded to go back to the rural areas. But sadly, nobody is thinking about that because they’re all waiting for the money from Abuja.

     

  • Crisis of youth unemployment

    We do not have the reliable statistics but it seems incontrovertible that we as a nation are facing one of the worst unemployment problems of our modern history. At the end of British colonial rule in Nigeria and its immediate aftermath, educated Nigerians did not have to wander around for years looking unsuccessfully for work. University graduates up till the 1970s found jobs in the civil service, teaching, security services and in the rapidly expanding private and professional services. Even secondary schools graduates still found jobs in government and commercial sector of the economy. The end of the civil war in Nigeria witnessed stupendous expansion of the civil, military, and security services. This came on the heel of exponential growth of hydrocarbons production in Nigeria which paid for the various new jobs created after the war. The careless saying of some of our leaders then was that our problem was not money but how to spend it. We did not save some of the money accruing to us from the sudden wealth. The reason given for this was that our country was crying for development. The post-civil war years of rehabilitation and reconstruction also required the expenditure of huge amount of money which happily became available through the revenue generated by the relatively large volume of our oil production and the high prices the largely sulphur-free sweet crude brought to our national exchequer. The oil wealth also led to tremendous expansion of educational institutions at primary, secondary and tertiary levels. This expansion was not matched with expansion of job opportunities for young people streaming out of these institutions. Furthermore, our population has been growing geometrically leading to having too many mouths to feed. Our peasant agriculture has not been able to cope with this increase in population thus resulting in huge food import bill. This means that if we can have a modern agricultural sector, we will not only feed ourselves, we would be able to export agricultural produce but furthermore we would be able to provide millions of jobs for our people. Solid agricultural foundation will be the take off plank for our industrialization. We should be able to grow all the cotton needed for our textile mills. From textile production we should be able like most industrialized countries move to heavy industries.

    We have the basic ingredients for rapid development and massive employment. We have abundant human resources in terms of manpower. We have invested huge amount of resources in manpower development. It is of course true that our educational facilities are not adequate but they are sufficient to produce reasonably educated people who can be trained to learn through trial and error and on the job. We also have considerable amount of natural resources. We have reliable energy resources such as vast hydrocarbon resources like oil and gas and considerable amount of strategic raw materials like copper, columbite, bauxite, uranium to mention a few. We have vast agricultural land that can be put to use through rain fed agriculture and or through irrigation. Our country is traversed by two perennial rivers in the Niger and the Benue. We have other rivers and the right kind of topography that can be harnessed for hydro-electricity. We have a huge internal market of 170 million people and the ECOWAS market of almost 300million is open and available to us for exploitation. We do not only have vast arable land, we have abundant sunshine which is a source of renewable energy. The question then arises why we are still bogged down with this level of underdevelopment and consequent youth unemployment. The answer is leadership and lack of vision by those who have had the opportunity to lead us since independence. Our leaders, I must say, have been too timid in challenging our people to face the task of development. Instead of growing our economy through hard work they have taken the line of least resistance by merely collecting commissions from multinational corporations involved in our hydrocarbon exploitation. They have not turned the millions of jobless people lazing about into building corps deployed appropriately into where they are needed to build houses, construct roads, build dams, sea and airports under the supervision of technically competent people. Rather than do this, we farm out our jobs to foreign companies in Europe and in recent times to Chinese who are given huge contracts to build what Nigerians should be building themselves. We do not even learn the right kind of lessons with our interaction with the rest of the world. Our leaders troop to China to behold the achievements of the Chinese, an achievement that took the Chinese the last few decades to consolidate. They did not do this through speech-making but through tears, bruises and if necessary blood. There can be no crown without the thorns. We have enough examples of peoples who took great strides in development through sacrificial work. Russia leapfrogged the bourgeois stage of economic development into the industrial and space age through dint of hard work. I am always irritated by the number of beggars and underemployed youths on our city roads selling all sorts of junks for a living. If I am allowed to say, I will assert with all emphasis at my command that most of the young hustlers in Lagos belong to farm settlements. Our governments must have the guts and the nerves to force those who are physically able to work for a living  to do so rather than living at the margin and edge of society becoming drug-taking jetsam and flotsam of an increasingly hopeless and dangerous underclass of the lumpen proletariat.

    Critics of my analysis may be wondering whether I am recommending a communist or collectivist approach to solving our economic and unemployment problem. I am not interested in theory or ideology. All I know is that we have serious economic problem which we have to solve or we would all go under. I also know we can learn from other countries that were faced with the same kind of problem in the past and how they were able to solve them. We may not be Russians and Chinese. Neither are we Americans with their limitless resources in Gods own country. We may not be driven by an ideological credo but whatever will or may work, we should not shy from trying it.

    The present federal government is toying with the idea of paying N5,000 poor relief to jobless youth.  This is a good idea but it must be accompanied by work either on the farm or on building sites. Young engineers should be mobilized and given tools and deployed to build roads and houses and railways using the abundant labour of the unemployed who will receive the poor relief until through their yeoman effort, the economy revives and grows and normalcy and correct economic relations and right wages  return to the land. In order to do this legally, appropriate legislations must be passed declaring a state of economic emergency in the land. If needs be, we must for now close our borders to the useless importation of all kinds of junks from all over the world. We must eat what we grow and wear what we make and what our tailors sew and our shoemakers make. Imagine the millions of jobs that will be created in this way. By trying to do things ourselves and actually succeeding, we would be challenged to do more things and gradually we will start making better things and more sophisticated products. I remember how we used to disparage Japanese goods when I was young. The same talking down on Chinese products was visited on goods coming from China. But nobody is laughing at Japanese and Chinese products now. As the foremost and biggest Black Country in the world, we must challenge ourselves and even forget or ignore economic orthodoxy to achieve our goal of development, a development anchored on adding value to our God given resources. I am in not suggesting economic autarchy because we live in an interdependent world. What I am suggesting is that we must build on our comparative advantage in certain areas and bring what we have to the quantum of global products rather than our present situation of hopeless dependency on the western and Asian world leading to massive unemployment at home.

  • Unemployment: Nigeria sits on gun powder, says Obasanjo

    Unemployment: Nigeria sits on gun powder, says Obasanjo

    Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has expressed concern over increasing graduate unemployment.

    He said the country will be toying with gave dangers should the trend persists

    The ex-president sounded the warning at the weekend at the 10th Anniversary and Convocation Ceremonies of the state-owned Tai Solarin University of Education (TASUED), Ijagun.

    He urged the federal, state and local governments to pay more attention to job creation for the growing unemployed youth population.

    Obasanjo, who spoke after the university conferred an honorary Doctorate Degree (PhD) in Political Science on him, said education is a meal ticket for anybody that has it.

    He noted that if university education could not facilitate development at the personal, family, community and national levels, the essence of it was then defeated.

    Obasanjo said: “Governments should do more in the area of employment. If there is no job for the unemployed to feed themselves and also to contribute to the development of the country, then we will all be sitting on a gun powder.

    “If university education was not for development, then it was not serving any useful purpose.”

    He added: “I believe in lifelong education. Nobody should stop learning until he or she dies.”

    He added that only the National Universities Commission (NUC) could explain why the proposed Federal Universities of Education did not materialise during his tenure as president 12 years ago.

    Obasanjo, now a university proprietor, noted that the Federal Government 12 years ago proposed the upgrading of the Adeyemi College of Education, Ivan Ikoku College of Education, and two others in Kano and Zaria into a full-fledged university status.

    He said he did know why the issue remained at the level of proposal.

    “The idea of university of education in Nigeria came up 12 years ago, when I was at the helms of affairs. I had thought that if we have specialised university for agriculture, specialised university for science and technology, why not for university of education? Why can we not have a university designated for education?

    “At that time at the federal level, four colleges of education, which belong to the Federal Government, would be turned into university of education. They included the Adeyemi College of Education in Ondo, Ivan Ikoku College of Education, one in Kano and I think the other in Zaria. We were ready to go. Well, why we could not go, Peter Okebukola is here. You can ask him and he will tell you.

    “Well, the Ogun State Government took this initiative and behold, we had the first University of Education in Ogun State. Mr. Governor, please help us to thank your predecessor for this.”

    The former president also gave an insight into why he accepted the honorary degree from TASUED.

    “I don’t indulge in accepting honorary award. It became a must because of the personality which the university was named after. He is one of the best educationists this country ever has; then his memory should remain real with everybody.

    “Mama HID is also being honoured by this university. Anywhere mama is been honoured, we must join hand to honour her,” Obasanjo said.

    He hailed Ogun State Governor Ibikunle Amosun for sustaining the legacy.

    About 5,970 graduated at the event, including a dozen who made First Class.

    Amosun promised the First Class graduands automatic jobs.

  • ‘PPP, panacea to unemployment’

    The three tiers of government have been urged to tackle unemployment through Public Private Partnership (PPP).

    The Managing Director of MeritChoice Limited, Mr. Gbeminiyi Oluwabusola, gave the advice at an empowerment summit in Lagos, held at the weekend. He lamented the poor state of infrastructure and the absence of incentives to boost entrepreneurship.

    Specifically, the MeritChoice boss lamented the poor power supply and state of the roads and land acquisition challenges, stressing that these deserved urgent attention.

    According to Oluwabusola, whose company is into Internet services, agriculture, cooperative association and import/export businesses, “Even for us that are empowering people to become entrepreneurs, business is scary. You need to know what it costs to run an Internet radio where a lot of money is spent on fuel because there is no regular electricity supply.”

    He said apart from power, which is key, the roads are so bad even in the cities, not to talk of the remote areas. “Presently, we are buying hectares of lands in millions for plantations of various crops under our agriculture project, but it is hard to get technical or even financial support from government. Though, government claims that there are loans for young entrepreneurs, but it is not readily available. It is not easy for people to access the loans,” he lamented.

    Oluwabusola added that there is no adequate education or awareness about what government is doing to encourage entrepreneurship, except for little laudable support from organisations such as the World Bank sponsored FADAMA project, which assists farmers to commence some level of rice production and its value chain.

    “Certainly, if we are able to enjoy required support from the government, that would enable us to empower more people and take many more people out of poverty and unemployment,” he said.

  • Ngige: We’ll battle unemployment

    Ngige: We’ll battle unemployment

    Minister of Labour and Employment Chris Ngige and the Minister of State, James Ocholi, yesterday promised to be at the forefront of the battle against unemployment.

    Addressing management staff of the ministry, the Minister said the Buhari administration was committed to the fight against unemployment.

    Ngige said: “We will be at the fore-front of the battle to stop the scourge of unemployment. We must as a people put on our thinking caps so that we can chart the way forward for employment generation.

    “We are the catalyst, the change agent of the change era. If we block leakages in our systems, the country will be better for it as resources will be made available for economic growth of the nation.”

    Ocholi (SAN) expressed confidence in the expertise of the management and staff of the ministry in line with the change mantra of the Buhari  administration

    Receiving the ministers, the Permanent Secretary, Dr. Clement Illoh, assured them of the cooperation of the ministry’s staff.

  • Don proffers solution to youth unemployment

    The Vice Chancellor of the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Professor Adebiyi G. Daramola, has called on governments at all levels to actively promote agro-allied business as part of the strategy to deal with youth unemployment in the country. In a lecture; Agriculture: A panacea for youth unemployment in Nigeria, delivered in Ikorodu, Lagos State, the don identified lack of technical efficiency, lack of entrepreneurial skill, population explosion, rural urban migration and economic recession as causes of youth unemployment in the country and blamed government for the situation.

    He also itemized migration, conflict, crime, low production and poverty as consequences of youth unemployment and urged governments to put a stop to all these through the promotion of agriculture by putting relevant policies in place.

    He was represented by Prof. Taiwo Amos of the same university.

    The occasion was the 15th Prof. A.A Adegbola Memorial Lecture and it was organized by the Ikorodu Division Resource Development Group (IDRDG).

     

     

     

     

     

  • Too little, too much – this unemployment benefit…

    The competition between the three regions is still too strong and bristly fought to enable us embark on that kind of venture. It will simply become another space for the dishonest execution of that war

    I hear that the upper house of the national assembly has done it again, put itself in the news. This time, I hear it has, as a body, disagreed to agree to put on hold the decision to pay unemployment benefits to unemployed youths. You know them don’t you? Oh I don’t mean benefits – anyone can recognise those. They are those things that when you put them in your pocket, you feel so light you’re practically floating on top of the planet. So no, I’m not asking if you know what benefits are. I’m asking if you know what unemployed youths are. They are those poor tykes who scour the streets in worn shoes hoping that if they kick up enough stones and pebbles, those things would whisper something to them about where jobs are hiding. I wish I could tell you whether it works or not.

    Well, bless this new government for having its heart in the right place. It actually upped and decided that it wanted to pay out a certain sum of money called ‘unemployment benefits’ to those young things. Perhaps, the money is to tide them over, or give them some strength while they muster up more resolve to kick up more pebbles, I don’t know. What I do know is that that effort is a little too little, too much because it is fraught with a great deal of unclear particles. Let’s see why now.

    To start with, the sum of five thousand can buy what now in the market? Hardly a thing. You try setting it aside as your transportation fare for the month in any city in Nigeria, and you’ll soon find that while it may take you out, it may not take you back home. Try setting it aside for food and you’ll soon find that while it may fill your plate with some grains of carbohydrates (if you look hard enough with your magnifying glass that is), it will not lay in your plate a tiny slice off the flanks of a willing cow for protein. Worse, it won’t scoop an ice cream cone in your dessert spoon. So, I guess the slightly esteemed senators were not saying no to the sum of Five Thousand Naira. I think they were saying no to the sum of Five Thousand Naira multiplied into the endless places occupied by Nigeria’s youths. I think someone said that will go into trillions of Naira or so a month.

    There are other considerations. Just how many unemployed youths do we have in Nigeria? 10 million? 20 million? Someone said he was conservatively putting the figure at 30 million. Now, that is worrisome. If you have that number of youths without employment sitting at home or kicking up pebbles on the streets, I think the country should be shaking in its shoes. The situation is clearly a tinderbox sitting on a dynamite box sitting on a gunpowder box. Now, you have the situation.

    Obviously though, we are all not quite agreed on just what makes for an unemployed youth. If we measure by the demographic factor of age, are we saying all young ‘uns who are employable should be from the age of ten or eleven to thirty or thereabouts? You better believe that many youths who are employed right now are no older than the least in this bracket. I have reported here that a youth of no more than twelve to sixteen is the breadwinner of his family even as he works in the dignified field of begging. Many other young ‘uns of no more than six, seven or eight years are also breadwinners for their families in the equally dignified field of hawking. So, yes, we do have unemployed youths of many questionable designs.

    Are we to pick our qualification from the factor of education? Are we saying that our unemployed are only those who have graduated but have not been able to get jobs? Then we must decide on what we intend to mean by the word ‘graduate’. Many have ‘graduated’ from either primary or secondary or trade school and have no intention of going to any school but to get a job to help their families. Now, will they qualify? Who is to decide who gets left out?

    Now, what about those people who are not very happy with their lowly jobs because they are of the decidedly unshakeable faith that nature has joined hands with their country to rob them of life changing opportunities? Who is to prevent them from registering their noble behinds on the benches of the welfare office? Supposing they believe that that five thousand naira would make a difference in their lives, shall we prevent them?

    Nigeria has no data base for anything – not for the number of beggars in the country or the number it needs; not for the number of houses in the country or the number it needs; not even for the number of farms it has in the country or the number it needs; not for the types of food eaten in the country or the number it needs; not for the air it breaths … Need I go on? Heck, we can hardly get the correct statistics for the country’s population because it varies so wildly from lips to lips depending on who you are and what you need the statistics for. The figure has moved steadily in the past ten years from 120 million to 140 million to 160 million, translating to a growth rate of 20 million per two or three years. Serious, no? I have never known a country grow so fast.

    I am sure I have told you this joke before but, like I always say, I love repeating my jokes since no one laughs at them anyway but me and myself; so, I will tell you again. There was this visiting dignitary who had to endure a long speech from a representative of the colony he was visiting. The locals read out a long list of what they needed – roads to take their agricultural produce to the market, rail transportation for the locals, etc. The visitor was astounded. ‘Did you not just tell me last year that nothing grows on your land, so we could not raise your taxes?’ he asked. ‘Yes, we did, your honour’, they replied, ‘but you see, last year’s statistics was raised for a purpose, and today’s for a different purpose.’

    More importantly, Sir/Ma, it has become nigh impossible to trust any Nigerian with any statistics. Ask a south westerner to compile the names of all unemployed young ‘uns in the land and what do you get? A list full of south westerners dead, half-dead and barely living. Ask a northerner to compile those names, and what do you get? A list full of northerners dead, half-dead and barely living. And if you ask a south easterner to compile the names, what do you think you’ll get? All the names of the fish in the sea, that’s what. The competition between the three regions is still too strong and bristly fought to enable us embark on that kind of venture. It will simply become another space for the dishonest execution of that war.

    This time, I think I agree with the senators that the time is not yet ripe for this well-meaning gesture. Too many things still need to be put in place for it to happen. For one thing, Nigerians must first be schooled to be honest, and secondly, they need to learn to put the country first. In the mean time, the business climate of the country must be sanitised to enable the market absorb more of our darling young ‘uns.

  • NDDC, Amnesty fight insecurity, unemployment

    NDDC, Amnesty fight insecurity, unemployment

    • Over 17,000 ex- militants get training

    The Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) and Presidential Amnesty Programme will henceforth collaborate to end insecurity and unemployment in the Niger Delta region.

    The Managing Director, NDDC, Barr. Bassey Dan-Abia, said this was imperative to avoid duplicating efforts in the region and ignore other important projects due to inadequate funds.

    Dan-Abia stated this in Abuja when the NDDC paid a courtesy call to the Presidential Amnesty Office.

    He said: “We cannot keep acting as if the Niger Delta region is segmented. I see Amnesty as a dependable ally in the crusade to develop the region because development goes beyond infrastructure. We should also develop the minds and our youths.”

    Coordinator of the Amnesty Programme, P.T. Boroh said no fewer than 17,000 ex- agitators have been trained in and outside the country.

    About 400 of them have been employed in public and private sectors while 1,583 ex- agitators are involved in post degree offshore programmes in different institutions. 1,300 of them are also receiving training all over the world.