|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Students of Nigerian tertiary institutions -especially undergraduates of public universities – should be happy, looking forward to the future with excitement. But they are not. Rather, they feel jinxed. They have become casualties of never-ending strikes by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), which put them at jeopardy in a competitive labour market.
These strikes have undesirable effects on the labour statistics, as unnecessary delays and disruption in learning result in skill deficiency and over-qualification of a lot of fresh graduates for many entry- level job openings, education experts say.
In its Q32018 Labour statistics report, National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) put the headline unemployment figure at 23.1%, an increase of 4.3 percentage points from 18.8% in the preceding quarter. Of the 9.7 million people that did absolutely nothing, 8.77 million or 90.1% were first time job seekers who have never worked before, NBS explained.
What the statistics failed to capture however is the fact that many of these firs-time job seekers are roaming the streets of Nigeria not primarily as a result of the dearth of entry-level jobs, but majorly due to the age restriction on the available jobs for which they have become over-qualified or inadequately skilled to handle.
Incessant strikes would likely worsen the unemployment situation in Nigeria because they elongate the time spent in schools to acquire the necessary qualification for employment, making fresh graduates older than the age bracket required by most jobs,” says Jameelah Yaqub, an associate professor of Economics at Lagos State University (LASU).
Strikes also lead to students losing out on quality education as they would subsequently have to be hurried out of the school system, Yaqub added.
‘’These strikes affect the quality of graduates of most public schools as semesters have to be shorten to cover up for periods lost to the strike.”
Whilst not completely agreeing that fresh graduates are unable to secure jobs due to age restrictions on entry-level roles, Emmanuel Noko, LEAD Researcher at Enugu-based M&C Research Institute, admits that strikes are a contributory factor to the deficiency of skills required in the corporate world.
“When you look at the situation from a specific vantage, strikes distort academic calendar and affects the ability of lecturers to cover their syllabus, which consequently tells on the competence of the graduates,’’ he said by phone.
Currently, the average age restriction for entry-level roles typically ranges from 24 to 26 years across many sectors. For instance, in the banking sector for 2018, Access Bank entry-level training programme has a 24 years age restriction for Bachelor degree holders. Wema Bank and some others has an upper limit of 26 years, while at First Bank it is 27 years.
For firms outside the banking sector like Dufil, KPMG and the likes, the average age for entry-level job is 26 years, with exception for Flourmill Nigeria, which allows applicants up to 27 years for its entry-level roles.
There is therefore potentially a crisis at hand as the fresh graduate unemployment figure might likely go up if the current strike which started early in November persists.
The Academic Staff Union of Universities has been at loggerheads with the federal government since November over the failure of the government to hold up its own end of a bargain as reached in 2009. They are also fighting for the implementation of a 2017 Memorandum of Action where issues bordering on Non-payment of salaries and earned academic allowances, funding of University staff school, release of operational license for the Nigeria University Pension Management Company, funding public universities and a host of other issues were addressed.
So far the Union has met with the government on several occasions, but little progress seems to have been made in getting the government to take the education sector seriously. But Yaqub insists that there should be full implementation of the budgetary allocation to education.
“Usually budget performance is less than 80 per cent. Corruption should be fought frontally because a lot of what is not implemented is lost to corruption,” he points out.
Ibrahim Bakare, another LASU associate professor of economics , opines that to reduce fresh-graduate unemployment, the government should review public universities’ curriculum to enable undergraduates acquire the skills relevant in the job market.
“In the past, before one completed one’s first degree, there were job opportunities lined up because the kind of training given to undergraduates related directly to industry need,” he noted. “But today the corporate world cannot reconcile what they need to the kind of training given to the students.”
Bakare also called for improved government funding the education sector, stressing that “it is important that a state of emergency be declared in our education system especially at tertiary level which is grossly underfunded.”
SEGUN ADAMS
