If Nigeria is to actually take her place among the world’s 20 most advanced economies by the year 2020, then, the nation’s work-age population must be provided with the opportunity of gainful employment. This will require government action and private sector participation in the speedy creation of jobs in a country with a long history of unemployment challenges.
In the first quarter of 2013, the Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics reported an addition of 174,326 jobs to the national economy. This latest figure was made possible through contributions from the public, formal and informal sectors of the economy, with a percentage distribution of 6 percent, 41 percent and 53 percent, respectively.
According to a 2013 report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), these estimates were reflective of a 12 percent improvement from projections in the previous quarter. This means that the nation has been blessed with certain mechanisms of economic change, and that the very mechanisms are showing the possibility of creating economic success.
However, as viable as it may seem, the current national economic machinery is too far from what Nigeria needs to drive her on the fast lane into the league of leading global economic giants in six years’ time. Ranked 23rd among 52 African countries and 153rd out of 186 nations across the globe in the 2013, United Nations human development report, Nigeria will require quick action and concrete plans to sustain the economic successes previously reported and attain the future corporate achievements currently anticipated.
Considering the latest unemployment rate of 24 percent, with youth unemployment accounting for 38 percent of total unemployment, and scoring the country less than one (0.471) on the United Nations’ Human Development Index, the nation’s National Economic Planning team must put in place an urgently devised means to step-up job creation and step-down unemployment from the respective 12 and 24 percentage thresholds.
With a population of 168.8 million people, comprising 47 percent of youthful workforce between the ages of 20 and 40 years, yet growing at the rate of 2.8 percent annually, it will only be most appropriate for Nigeria’s economic planners, both in the public and private sectors, to explore pre-existing and emerging opportunities for job creation and wealth generation.
As President Goodluck Jonathan once said in his 2011 budget speech, “unemployment among our youth is one of our biggest challenges, and the time has come to create jobs and lay a new foundation for Nigeria’s economic growth.”
And since the private sector is currently leading the global trend in employment expansion and wealth creation, the various government policies and programmes for implementing the president’s declaration should provide an interface for public-private partnerships between the government and the private sector.
These corporate partnerships will make it possible for non-state business actors to get better organised by virtue of strict government supervision in anticipation for optimum returns from commonly agreed terms of taxation.
In sectors where this has been tried, the results have also been commendable. The telecommunications sector is a prime example for Nigeria in this regard. And this good example could also be replicated in other businesses that are less capital demanding to set up, but can spin out jobs and mop up unemployment with the level of emergency that the current situation in the country truly demands.
A certain automobile service and repair company, known as Auto Fixers, has entered into such partnership with the University College Hospital in Ibadan. The hospital leased out land and the company came in to set-up its highly sophisticated and automated workshop.
Under this mutually beneficial arrangement, the general public is charged at standard market prices for services rendered but the hospital official fleet is serviced at hugely discounted prices, while private vehicles of staff members are worked at half price.
According to Adesoji Adedoyin, AutoFixers’ business development manager, the company presently employs 16 technical and administrative permanent staff, and is rapidly growing in response to increasing public patronage. And to meet up with current demand, more technicians are being hired, with many more technical interns being trained so that the company may absorb them into its planned chain of workshop expansion programmes.
If the AutoFixers’ model is successfully replicated across the country by private businesses and public institutions in other services, such as car washing and laundry business, the Federal Government’s agenda to transform the Nigerian economy may yet be further pushed in the direction of massive job creation and declining unemployment.
By: Yange Ikyaa
