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Business owners can’t seem to have enough of this rhetoric, “…graduates just aren’t employable anymore”. True or not, skilled or not, if the public sector and private sector don’t start working together to solve the high youth unemployment crisis in Nigeria, it’s going to soon start costing us all the growth we very much desire.
In 2017, unemployed and underemployed Nigerians between the ages of 15-44 eclipsed 28.4 million people, that is greater than the entire population in Ghana! This incomprehensible scale of idle capacity is costing Nigeria lost economic output of $60 billion (based on GDP per capita figures) annually and more than $10 billion in unearned taxes for the government!
If this problem goes unchecked, industry revenue will soon plateau or even drop precipitously as aggregate demand gradually fades away with every additional unemployed youth.
Creating jobs is neither solely the responsibility of the government nor the duty of industries and corporations, it’s everyone’s responsibility. If we do nothing to create jobs, we risk creating a society of high inequality, rising crime rates, stagnated economic growth and high level of poverty. This helps no one.
Mr President believes Nigerian youths are uneducated and lazy. To some extent that’s not untrue, some youths feel entitled and that creates room for laziness. But what Mr President failed to note is that several millions of unemployed youths in Nigeria are educated, hardworking and genuinely looking for employment opportunities. However, these opportunities are scarce and shrinking even further with the struggling economy, thus rendering millions of our vibrant youths idle. If the business environment were more conducive, many of them would have become entrepreneurs. Those who try to start-up their own enterprises quickly realize the support structure for start-up companies in the country is very inadequate and inaccessible to a vast majority who need it most.
Somehow the term unemployment is completely misunderstood by most people. To be unemployed according to International Labour Organization (ILO), you must have been actively looking for a job in the last six weeks, possess the capability to work if the opportunity presents itself but you have still not been able to find a job during this period. Therefore if 11.5 million youths are unemployed, they are not lazy, they have been searching but they haven’t found the opportunity to work. If 2.9 million graduates and 5 million semi-skilled workers are unemployed, they are not uneducated, they are graduates of both local and international vocational and higher education institutions. That’s why we called them skilled!
So if Mr President and well-meaning citizens of the country feel Nigerian graduates are unemployable, make them employable. If they have no skill, teach them new skills. If they are lazy, force them to be hardworking. The problem won’t go away overnight, but it will take a conscious effort from all stakeholders to ensure that youth unemployment which National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported was 61.6% in 2017 drops to 6.16% in 2027. It’s going to be tough but who says it can’t be done?!
Emeka Ucheaga
Ucheaga is Managing Partner, Emeka Ucheaga Advisory
