Did President Jonathan see the frontpages of all the major Nigeriannewspapers yesterday? If he did, washe able to sleep last night? Well, forthe information of the president,most Nigerians who saw thephotographs of applicants at theNigeria Immigration Service (NIS)recruitment exercise couldn’t sleep.Nigerians are scared. They arefrightened by the inexorableconse quences of such level ofunemployment. The augury for thiscountry and indeed any othercountry in that situation is verydangerous.This page has discussed Nigeria’sunemployment ticking time- bombseveral times. I have made severaldesperate attempts to draw theattention of President Jonathan tothe danger that stares this nation inthe face. I have written severaltimes about the scandalousunemployment level in the country.As I write this piece, at least 40million Nigerians are unemployed.That is more than the population ofCanada, Iraq, Ghana, Venezuela orSaudi Arabia. And these are notsmall countries by any standard. 54per cent of Nigerian youths areunemployed and more than 80 percent of those who graduate fromuniversities and other tertiaryinstitutions every year do not findemployment. If the president doesnot see a coming disaster, then, heshould not have been president inthe first place.Even those who are employed arenot gainfully so. 110 millionNigerians live below $1 a day. Thatmeans 110 million Nigerians aredesperately poor. When this kind ofreality is presented to PresidentJonathan, his first reaction hasalways been that he met all thismess as president and that hedidn’t cause them himself. Typically,he says that it is not as if when hecame, there were good roads andgood schools and electricity and hedestroyed them himself. That is notthe mindset and language of anation’s leader. Anyone who wouldspeak that way should not even bepresident of a nation ab initio . Sucha person should not even be allowedto become a local governmentchairman. Besides, the president’salibi is not even true. The level ofcorruption in the government underhis watch is what has worsenedeverything. It is corruption thatmakes it impossible to invest in vitalcomponents of the economy and theinfrastructure that would havelessened such disgraceful level ofunemployment.For instance, there are two issuesthat the president could havepersonally championed that wouldhave altered the current verydangerous direction he is leadingthe country. I say “personally”because when there is an emergencysituation in a hospital, it is thedoctor that personally takes over thescalpels in the emergency room. In anormal hospital setting that is notin an emergency, the doctor can givedirection to other health workers onhow to handle the patient. Nigeriais today in an ultra-emergency situation.Only desperate remedies can evenbegin to pull Nigeria back from theprecipice. One way out is to createfive million new small businesses.Small businesses are the engines ofa serious economy. A small businesscreates between two and five newjobs, which means that with fivemillion new businesses, you couldpotentially create up to 25 millionnew jobs. Another plausible way outis to build one million new housingunits across the country. Theconstruction of one million newhouses can potentially create about35 million new jobs as engineers,quantity surveyors, architects,mortgage institutions, plumbers,vulcanisers, cement distributors,block moulders, tiles manufacturersand sellers, food sellers, insurers,furniture makers, facility managers,gardeners, florists, security men –it’s a very long list – will begainfully employed across thenation. And nobody should tellNigerians that the creation of fivemillion new businesses andconstruction of one million newhousing units are not possiblebecause Nigerians now have an ideaof how much of their money is beingstolen every day. I will not givedetails of how easily these can beachieved within a tenure herebecause I have an “intellectualpr operty right” on these and manymore.It is not even true that Jonathan didnot contribute to our currentsituation. When people steal in tensof trillions of naira, there will benothing left to meaningfully createjobs and provide security for thecitizens.The immigration recruitment tragedyof the weekend is a bad omen and aconfirmation of all the statistics. Inone of the reports, the immigrationauthorities received up to six millionapplications for only 4,500 vacancies.The Customs has its own story; so doINEC, federal civil service, privatecompanies, etc. Do we need to knowwhy it is so easy to recruit youthsinto kidnapping, armed robbery,Boko Haram, Niger Delta militancyand several other crimes these days?It is because, for most of them, itwill be their only hope for alivelihood. We are slowly andsteadily but surely sleepwalking intoa disaster and our president doesnot even know it. Or should we say,he doesn’t give a damn?
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 08:56:04 +0000
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