26 Feb 2009 |
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Nigeria's unemployment crisis By Reuben Abati Labour Minister, Adetokunbo Kayode quoting the World Bank says Nigeria has a population of 40 million unemployed persons. How did the World Bank arrive at this figure? What methods did its researchers adopt? It is shameful that Nigeria's Labour Minister cites the figure with so much glee and without a tinge of embarrassment. That Nigeria has to rely on the World Bank to assess the number of the unemployed among its people is a reflection of the country's underdevelopment. There is a Federal Office of Statistics. But it is under-funded and routinely ignored by policy makers. Nigeria suffers veritably from the ill of planning without statistics. We don't even know how many we are exactly and there is no central database in any of the country's sectors providing basic statistics. The World Bank figure of 40 million unemployed in Nigeria (28. 57%) should be an understatement. Two years ago, the Nigerian position was that about 70 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line. But the politics of statistics aside, 40 million Nigerians having no job to do constitutes a ready army of dispossessed and alienated citizens. A double-digit unemployment ratio is enough to result in the removal of a government in a serious country. When US President Franklin Roosevelt introduced the famous New Deal in the 1930s to rescue America from depression, the highest unemployment rate by 1934 was 25%. Forty million is nearly the population of Great Britain. It is more than half the population of France and Italy and more than four times the population of Sweden. Indeed, the Nigerian landscape is crawling with a rapidly mutating population of jobless, able-bodied men and women who are angry, ill, frustrated and whose disempowerment accounts largely for the reign of cynicism in the land, and a high mortality rate. But the good news is that the Federal Government of Nigeria is sufficiently concerned about the growing rate of unemployment in the country, it has now decided to act. Prince Kayode says "unemployment has assumed a different and worrisome dimension in view of effects of the current global financial and economic crisis of the people..." In Nigeria, the global financial meltdown has become the perfect excuse for every distortion in the system, whereas the Nigerian economy was already in the throes of multiple sclerosis long before the global crisis. Prince Kayode admits this much when he noted that attempts had been made by previous administrations to tackle the scourge of unemployment. His verdict: "It is regrettable that in spite of these efforts, socio-economic indicators continue to show that the number of men and women joining the ranks of the unemployed working poor and those in vulnerable groups is perpetually on the increase". But what is being proposed is a hideous joke - a National Employment Council (NEC). Brief: to develop strategies for tackling unemployment in Nigeria. Membership: drawn from the Nigerian Employers Consultative Association (NECA), Trade Union Congress (TUC), Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), International Labour Organisation (ILO), Employment and Wages Commission, National Productivity Centre (NPC), National Directorate for Employment (NDE) and National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP) with the Minister of Labour as chairperson. Everything is wrong with this idea. It is simply another bureaucracy. To solve the problem of unemployment, the Federal Ministry of Labour does not need to organise summits, workshops, talk shows or meetings which would constitute another source of leakage. In what ways would the National Employment Council (NEC), be different from the National Directorate on Employment and the National Manpower Development Board, two existing structures whose monumental failure speaks to the inefficiency of government? And shouldn't the state and local councils be more concerned about addressing unemployment? Is Minister Kayode under the illusion that his Ministry, and the Federal Government can provide a solution that will reduce unemployment in all the 36 states of the Federation? We suspect so. The unemployment crisis in Nigeria is linked to galloping poverty and of course, this should be obvious. But to put Nigerians to work, the solution lies in a reinvention of the nature and purpose of government. Once upon a time in this country, Nigerians were a busy people; jobs were available, unemployment was low. In Ibadan, Lagos, Onitsha, Kaduna, Enugu, Port Harcourt, there were industrial complexes where factories produced goods for both local consumption and export; and an army of workers - skilled and non-skilled queued up to work and earn a living. The industrialization wave of the 70s Nigeria was so phenomenal that government had to introduce a number of measures including the Land Use Act in order to remove obstacles in the path of industry. Companies rushed to the universities every year-end and later to the NYSC camps, to recruit skilled workers. Then, a certificate guaranteed a job, and a better life. This was the period when education was seen as a tool of social advancement. Even artisans had jobs to do. There were expatriates in Nigeria. When the Ghanaian economy failed in the late 70s, Ghanaians trooped to Nigeria to look for jobs. Long before the global economic meltdown, Nigeria's factories had started closing down, throwing their employees into the labour market. The factories became churches and mosques. In one year about 100 textile factories closed shop. Michelin, the tyre manufacturing company, left Nigeria too. Dunlop has announced its plans to go the Michelin way. Capacity utilization is at an all-time low. The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria which used to play a key role in the policy formulation and implementation processes has been reduced to an assembly of complainants. Nigeria is no longer a productive country; it is a dumping ground for imports. Its economy provides jobs for outsiders not the people at home. It has since exported many of its best hands to other countries in a corrosive brain drain syndrome. The unemployment situation is so bad that university graduates stay at home for upwards of ten years unable to find a thing to do. Education has become unattractive. Employers of labour complain about the rising population of unemployable Nigerians. The fashion these days is for many employers to reserve spaces for Nigerians with foreign qualifications. Nigeria's higher institutions are producing a steady stream of graduates whose skills are suspect, and whose work ethic is abhorrent. The crisis cannot be fully described. But at the root of it is the failure of government and leadership. To make a difference, Nigerian governments must take practical steps. What is required is not rhetoric, not bureaucracy. One simple solution is for the government to resolve the country's energy crisis. A government that cannot provide regular electricity, something that is taken for granted in Mali, Ghana, Niger, Gambia, in Cote d'Ivoire and elsewhere, lacks the moral right to complain about unemployment. Virtually every factory in Nigeria runs with the help of power generators. The key excuse given for the winding down of the textile factories, Michelin, Dunlop and other companies is the high and unprofitable cost of energy. Factored into the cost of production, doing business in Nigeria is unprofitable. It is the same problem that the telecommunication companies complain about - call tariffs have remained high, in part because every GSM base station is maintained throughout the year with power generators. Last December, the Fashola Government decorated the streets of Lagos with Christmas trees and lightings. Each Christmas tree had to be kept lit in the evenings with the help of generators. How much work can anybody guarantee in a country that is effectively in darkness; in a country of 140 million people that is down to about 800MW of electricity? Even Power Holding Company offices use generators and the officials are quick to draw attention to this. Many artisans are out of work again because of this energy crisis. Furniture makers, machinists, aluminium window fitters, welders, vulcanisers, tailors, traders - cannot all function. In desperation, a large population of young Nigerians has taken to the riding of motorcycles, or to crime, but effectively, most of our people are under-employed. On the streets of Lagos daily can be seen a crowd of young men and women hawking pure water sachets, biscuits, aphrodisiacs and all kinds of wares - the total cost of which is so small their efforts cannot be dignified with a description as "work". There is a gross abuse and under-utilisation of human resources in Nigeria with direct impact on national productivity and competitiveness. Part of the leadership challenge is to ensure that states and local councils become centres of productivity in order to raise the national competitive index. In the country's 36 states and 774 local councils (minus Bakassi Local Government?) there isn't much productive activity. The states are at best rent-collection centres. Every month, Commissioners for Finance travel to Abuja to collect their state's share of Niger Delta and Federal Revenue. This culture of dependency has robbed the state governments of the resolve to create job opportunities for the people. Job creation is a campaign slogan. When a state Governor says he has created 1,500 jobs, it is either he has distributed a number of motorcycles in his constituency or employed a few area boys as tax revenue collectors or party thugs! In the First Republic, the Regional Governments - East, West, North, South - did more than that. The leadership provided jobs for the people in real terms, resulting in a healthy competition among the regions. If this culture had continued, many of our principal cities - Lagos, Port Harcourt, Kano, Onitsha...will not be so congested. There will be less migration, in search of work, because opportunities would be fairly evenly distributed across the country. Guaranteeing job security is one of the fundamental objectives of state policy. The failure to do so is an assault on the people's rights and expectations. The dynamics of school-to-work transition must be reconsidered. What does work mean in the Nigerian context? What kind of workers does the economy require? What is the connection between the school system and the job market in the context of national manpower development? These are basic questions that serious nations ask in seeking to address the unemployment challenge. But Nigerian leaders seem to be more interested in form rather than substance. In the meantime, the country's education system continues to produce millions of graduates for whom there is no market demand. And what constitutes employment in Nigeria? Millions of people waking up in the morning and rushing off to "work" as it were - slaving throughout the day and the month, and paid starvation wages, treated shabbily by employers who are protected by the conviction that a Nigerian worker is a beggar without a choice, living in neighbourhoods where life is insecure, in a society where there are no safety nets and where crime and deception are more rewarding than honest work? This is the bigger challenge: the quality and the value of work in Nigeria, and making the country productive, efficient and competitive.
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