DELE ADEOLUWA
The Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) recruitment tragedy of March 15, 2014 remains a sore thumb, an ugly spectacle of the unemployment bogey plaguing the land. Nothing reminds us more poignantly about the monstrous fiend that job crisis constitutes than that recruitment fiasco.
In that tragedy, about 6.5 million job seekers besieged various stadia in most states of the country and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), chasing only 4,000 vacancies in the NIS. At least, 16 applicants were confirmed dead and an uncountable number injured as a result of overcrowding, stampede, exhaustion and impatience.
The labour market is now so saturated that job seekers are getting desperate by the day. They grab every strand of space that looks like a semblance of job vacancy, as millions now compete for a few vacancies.
The Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, for instance, disclosed recently that over five million Nigerian youths had applied for the 400,000 vacancies in the Batch C of the N-Power programme as at August 9, when that batch closed.
N-Power is one of the Buhari administration’s intervention schemes that seek to address youth unemployment. It imbues graduate and non-graduate beneficiaries with relevant technical and business skills that will enhance their work and livelihood.
About the same period, the Oyo State government announced that 441 First Class graduates were among the candidates who applied to write the computer-based test for teaching jobs in the state’s secondary schools.
The situation is getting grimmer and gloomier. The latest report of the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS), just released, is very damning. According to the report, the nation’s unemployment rate has increased to 27.1per cent, from 23.1per cent in the third quarter of 2018 when the unemployment report was last published.
The nation’s under-employment rate has also climbed to 28.6 per cent. Under-employment reflects those working less than 40 hours a week or in jobs that under-utilise their skills, time or education.
The unemployment rate among Nigerians, aged between 25 and 34, the largest segment of the labour force, stands at 30.7 per cent. The implication of the new unemployment rate is that about 21.7 million Nigerians remain unemployed, says the report, with the labour force of 80.2 million.
Now, the worst fear since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has happened. The nation has slid into the second economic recession in five years and the worst in over three decades. The NBS report says the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contracted by 3.62 per cent in the third quarter of 2020, the second consecutive quarterly decline in GDP since the 2016 recession. The last time the nation recorded such a cumulative GDP decline was in 1987 when the GDP declined by 10.8 per cent.
The gloomy economic picture signals spiralling inflation, which would worsen poverty and plummet the living standard further as prices of goods and services consequently shoot higher and higher.
The NBS report says the performance of the economy is a reflection of the residual effects of the restriction placed on movements and economic activities across the country in the first quarter of 2020 in response to the global upheaval caused by COVID-19.
In the month of March, virtually all the strata of the national life were in total lockdown, resulting in the worst all-round dislocations. The maiden report of COVID-19 impact monitoring survey released some months back by NBS revealed that 42 per cent of the respondents lost their jobs to the pandemic; many firms had to lay off a percentage of their work force to survive the hurtful pangs of the dreaded virus.
Commerce, services and agriculture sectors, according to the report, recorded the highest layoffs during the period. About 79 per cent households also reported a sharp decline in their incomes since mid-March, 2020, resulting in debilitating deprivations.
One of the immediate multiplier effects of the spiralling unemployment crisis, occasioned by the worsening economic downturn, is social unrest, arising from increasing insecurity. Many jobless, frustrating youths now channel their boundless energies into malevolent tendencies. They engage in all manner of larceny. Having inured themselves to debauchery, they vent their spleen on society by taking to cybercrimes, ritual killings, robberies, kidnapping for ransom, cultism and other vicious activities.
The job crisis is partly a corollary of the under-funding of education in the country, which has engendered an increasing decline in the quality of teachers and infrastructure in schools. The problem is not helped by the incessant strikes by tertiary institutions’ lecturers, most especially the universities.
There is also the problem of curricula in tertiary institutions, some of which are becoming too outdated to meet modern employment needs. In essence, even when the vacancies exist, very negligible number of those who apply, in most cases, are actually employable.
But the story is changing as many of the tertiary institutions appear to have realised this lacuna and have begun to adapt and intersperse their curricula with courses that are now, in addition to the students’ major disciplines, inculcating in them entrepreneurial or business-oriented skills that are capable of making them more employable or self-employed after graduation.
And even in the informal sector, this entrepreneurial spirit is catching on. Many graduates and non-graduates are now exploring alternatives as the job crisis worsens. They now go for trainings in such modernised businesses or vocations as catering/baking, fashion designing, mechanical/automobile work, furniture making, tiling, bricklaying, printing, beads/hats making, leather crafts, solar power, barbing/hairdressing, fish/poultry/rice farming and other agricultural ventures.
Many job seekers are now finding solace in many of these vocations as alternatives to trudging through streets searching for non-existent paid employment.
The Buhari administration is commendably encouraging this entrepreneurial spirit by frontally tackling the unemployment monster through bold intervention programmes. Some of them are initiatives through which soft loans are granted beneficiaries to venture into small and medium scale businesses.
These beneficiaries are those who ordinarily cannot meet the stringent requirements set by normal lending institutions. So, the main attraction of these intervention funds is the interest rates that are far cheaper than normal.
Most of these funds are managed and disbursed by the Bank of Industry and Central Bank of Nigeria for various purposes.
This administration has, in addition to these intervention funds, established no fewer than 25 initiatives aimed at specifically empowering the youth across the country in the last five years.
One of the boldest of such initiatives is the N75 million earmarked under the Nigerian Youth Investment Fund (NYIF). The disbursement of the fund, an initiative of the Federal Ministry of Youths and Sports Development, was flagged off on October 15, 2020, by the minister, Sunday Dare.
According to the minister, the loan, which was one of the government’s boldest responses to the #EndSARS protests, would be funded by the CBN and spread over three years. It will cater to youth-owned businesses and investment needs. The loan, Dare said, has an interest rate of five per cent per annum and a tenor of five years with a moratorium of up to 12 months. These interventions are certainly the road to travel now as jobs increasingly shrink in the formal sector and we grapple with the biting fangs of recession. These emerging SMEs are capable of stimulating and reflating vibrant micro- economic activities, with the concomitant effect of gradually enhancing the beneficiaries’ financial muscle. That way, poverty and hunger are being decimated.
It is hoped that these intervention programmes will be efficiently managed and sustained. Beneficiaries are also implored to reciprocate government’s noble gestures and repay as and when due, as they take those loans, to ensure that they(loans)revolve, to take more and more Nigerians out of crippling poverty.
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