Oka Obono
It is not because graduate unemployment is high that Nigeria is in its present developmental predicament. To the contrary, it is because that rate is not higher than it is. Many people in the labour market are currently “working” when, on grounds of merit, they should not be. From their unmerited positions, they compromise visions, frustrate progress, and accelerate the demise of a decrepit economy already suffering from complications associated with political and electoral pericarditis.
Basically, human behaviour is motivated by self interest. Rooted in the predatory instinct and a pecuniary worldview, economic behaviour is governed by imbalances in resource distribution. Job hunting becomes the industrial equivalent of lions prowling in the Serengeti, when it is wasted and made desolate by famine and drought, and the lion population grows lean and desperate. The pride must feed. Job seeking among mercenaries is governed by similar attitudes. Man must wack. They lookout for what they consider opportunities in the form of protracted civil conflict and fratricidal bloodshed in other countries. As with hired assassins, they have no personal investment in the values raging for recognition, or fundamental commitment to the issues at stake. It is about the pay– nothing personal.
Now, in the labour market, the qualifications of the prospective employee are sometimes beside the point, except in the private sector. He is in earnest, victim of grinding poverty rendered penniless by the early death of a benefactor. His eighth child is in hospital, suffering from malnutrition and general unhappiness. His children’s school fees are unpaid. His wife just ‘put to bed’. He has an ageing mother to care for. His rent is due. He is in deep debt. He borrowed money to come to this place and hopes you would help him get back to his family. In short, Oga, he has no other means of support or hope of livelihood. You must give him this job. He needs the money.
There is no talk of the value he would bring to that job other than this woeful narrative. It is the mentality that fuels the “Oga, I wan’ work” syndrome and the grovelling that goes with it: “I humbly beg to apply for work in your esteemed establishment, etc, etc….Signed, Your obedient servant, I.B. Goat”. The job then goes to the best groveller. But, by that appointment, he transfers his peculiar frustrations to the general public. Nigeria is fortunate it has a high unemployment rate. A lower rate makes it analogous to a car with radiator trouble. It were better to park it and seek competent help than invite thirty-six jobless mendicants, drawn from the states of the federation, to destroy it altogether and draw allowances for doing so!
Everyone seeks a piece of the Nigerian pie. No one seeks work in order to serve, add value to society or generate wealth to be harnessed by posterity. At higher levels, appointments are the means of maintaining trust networks that anticipate future villainy and corruption. It is all about the money. Just to be clear, it doesn’t follow that every leader is greedy and rapacious any more than that poverty makes a soul more virtuous. Our habits and habitats, together with our attitudes, attributes and aptitudes, determine our latitudes and altitudes. No, I did not take that line from Bishop Oyedepo. Systems simply reach saturation points beyond which they cannot absorb further mediocrity without imploding. Unemployment is a measure of that saturation and an aggregate index of individual traits and group employability.
Read Also: Youths won’t trust government unless we are honest with them- Osinbajo
In the March, 1899 issue of the Philistine Magazine, Elbert Hubbard wrote of “the imbecility of the average man – the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it”. In the article, now known as “A Message to Garcia”, Hubbard lambasted “slip-shod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work”. He castigated the “incapacity for independent action, this moral stupidity, this infirmity of the will, this unwillingness to cheerfully catch hold and lift” as the reason behind the example he gave of how, if one advertised for a stenographer, ninety percent of those who applied would be unable to either spell or punctuate.
Thus, mediocrity and imbecility are first-cousins. Those “at work” are products of this degenerate climate which those struggling to enter will merely perpetuate. It will be the addition of incompetence to mediocrity. It is not government’s responsibility to create jobs if there is no demand in relevant sectors, or the linkages are weak. What government can do is create enabling environments for small businesses and motivate investments in them, so that households can find a foothold in the economy on their own terms.
Small is bigger. It is time to draw relationships between personal inner traits and external social circumstances for the only opportunities that will serve us permanently are those that we engender ourselves.
