Tourism, entertainment can create jobs –Modey The Lagos State Co-ordinator, National Directorate of Employment, Mr. Joseph Modey, speaks about the employment prospects in the tourism and entertainment industries in this interview with IFE ADEDAPO Considering the situation where people in white-collar jobs are earning high income compared to graduates making use of vocational skills to earn a living, don’t you think that we are creating a condition where few people are high income earners, thus widening the income inequality gap? It may be so but not necessarily. Unfortunately for us, it may not be a matter of choice anymore because it just has to be like that. This is because employment opportunities in paid job situations have withered out. They don’t exist anymore. Employment opportunities generated by self employment do exist and the informal sector for now is very fertile with such opportunities. We envisage that when graduates enter that sector, the level of services they will render will be higher than what the present operators are offering. Therefore, there will be an upgrade in facilities for these services and the quality of the services itself. If that happens, the operators themselves will be able to dictate the income that is accruable from such activities. Machines and technological innovations are gradually replacing people in workplaces. How can the country create alternative jobs to absorb the increasing number of the unemployed? I think for us, it is still a long time to come before we can come face-to-face with that kind of situation. We can’t jump the gun. Most of the countries that are doing these have various means by which they maintain the level of jobs available to the citizens. But we have to be proactive Remember that there are employment opportunities in the entertainment and tourism sectors, with high income generating activities. These are areas that require a personal touch. Deploying machines to perform the role of human beings in those areas cannot work. The job opportunities are still there and we as a nation have not been coping with it, but we have to prepare for it. Certainly, we have to expand this industry for more people to participate. Some states are already on such path. In Cross River State, this is the season when tourism and entertainment are vibrant because of the Calabar carnival and most airplanes are loaded going to Calabar and they come back empty because people, in preparation for the event, start saving from January in order to be there in December. So it is a good sign and it shows that tourism has a place in employment generation. The example of Cross River state speaks for itself. How will you rate the effectiveness of NDE programmes since inception? I can say we have done relatively well and we have to contend with scarce resources. Within the limit of resources available to us, we have done very well. With more resources, what would you have done better? Our empowerment capability would have been much higher. Right now, we are strictly engaged with training for skill acquisition and entrepreneurship development and we follow up on all these aspects especially empowerment because that is what translates the vocational training and entrepreneurship development training into actual employment. Adequate resources would have assisted in empowering more people and creating employment. Apart from skill acquisition, what else can help in tackling unemployment? The issues are complex and that is why we develop a multidimensional approach. We have counselling services, which serves as an avenue for re-orientating graduates who are always expecting white-collar jobs. We bring them to the realities of the time and we tell them that in order to escape the scourge of unemployment, much has to be done by way of adopting methods that can take them to self employment and self reliance. The private sector is regarded as a major employer of labour, how has the sector fared in this regard? We agree that the private sector is potentially one of the most viable options to create jobs but the capacity there is also low because that sector is beset with so many problems, including decaying and insufficient infrastructure, poor power generation, insecurity and for now these are the issues that fortunately the present government is tackling head-on. There is hope at the end of the tunnel because with what the government is doing now, that sector is becoming more viable as an option that will absorb some of the unemployed graduates. Some government agencies have overlapping functions, how do you execute your programmes without affecting another agency? To some extent, yes. But you see, the overlapping functions are there, but the fact is that the volume of unemployment is so large that even the large number of agencies performing overlapping functions are still unable to cope. I think that the government needs to concentrate on only a few of these agencies and empower them sufficiently to be able to cope with the entire programmes to remove the incidence of overlapping functions. Have you considered partnering with universities in order to instill entrepreneurship in undergraduates? That will be premature because if you empower graduates when they are still in school, we are at best providing a distraction from their primary duty which is their educational pursuit. We have however intervened midway, that is at the level that the graduate has just left school and is entering the national service and that is when NDE comes in. Part of what we do is to draw the attention of the newly graduated students to the reality of unemployment as it exists and we let them know that the best option is self employment and we offer them entrepreneurship development training while they are in their orientation camps. Copyright PUNCH.All rights reserved. This material, and other digital content on this website, may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or in part without prior express written permission from PUNCH. Contact: editor@punchng ift.tt/1x9gBBE ift.tt/1x9gFRU [[Boost your social presence with NAIRALIKES nairalikes ]] #nigeria x #nairalikes #vanguardng
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 01:42:29 +0000
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