Nis jobs tragedy and unemployment time bomb

| credits: neearo

“Nigeria sits on many time bombs, but the deadliest time bomb of all is that of youth unemployment.  There can be no talk of good governance where millions go unemployed and many are under the crushing weight of poverty” – Bola Tinubu, 26 February, 2014

The nation is very much in the throes and traumatic aftermath of last Saturday’s death of at least 23 young Nigerians, who showed up for the aptitude test of the Nigeria Immigration Service.  The job hunters were trampled to death in stampedes which erupted in the screening centres of Abuja, Minna, Benin and Port Harcourt. The sensible postponement of the exercise in Lagos spared the nation more deaths in the wake of the lethal bedlam that marked the event.

It is now history and a matter for profound regret that rather than show penitence at the massive fraud and organisational fiasco that led to the disasters, Interior Minister, Abba Moro, chose to indict the victims of a system that sentences its youths to fatal ordeals. Of course, our penchant as a nation for costly bungling is legendary.  A recent example is the adjournment of the much advertised National Conference almost as soon as it was inaugurated, because of logistical hitches.  So, no one had taken time to think through the details of organising such an important event?  In the same manner, a little forethought on the mechanics and logistics of holding the massive immigration screening on the same day would have averted the tragic fiascos; especially in the light of a similar disastrous outing in 2008 by the same parastatal.  But then, this is a nation that is organisationally challenged; flaunting great potentialities but unable to collate them to achieve desired results. More baffling is the fact that the calamity occurred in the context of a paramilitary institution which ought to have accumulated the disciplinary orientation and strategic insight germane to crowd control.  But then we are dealing with decaying and dysfunctional institutions in which human lives and happiness are seen as expendable.

Anomie and the absurd, ingredients of gripping thrillers and engrossing fictions are normalised on our streets.  The disappearing and reappearing petrol queues with their tolls on productivity and health; the unending wait for a glimmer of electric power and the virtual shutdown of essential services as a result of strikes or cash crunches are all varieties of the disorder which occasioned last Saturday’s harvest of deaths.

Consider too, the emptiness of official assurances in the tragedy.  On Friday, the minister was quoted as saying that “Adequate arrangement has been made for security and effective conduct of the test.” On Saturday, the solemn assurances went up in smoke and nobody as far as we know, including the minister has lost his job for shoddy performance.  Do you recall, by way of a related example, that at the outset of the current elongated petrol shortage, the oil minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, came over to Lagos and assured that the hiccup would be short-lived; and that marketers caught hoarding fuel would be sanctioned? Well, nothing of the sort as far as we know has happened; but there are official statements being made concerning the need “to deregulate the downstream sector of the industry” an ominous warning that the siege on consumers will soon be legitimised by an increase in the pump price of petroleum products.  Frightening are the omens if we recall the upheavals of January 2012.

Let us now touch on the scourge of youth unemployment which is at the heart of Saturday’s tragedy.  The statistics of woe are distressing enough.  520, 000 applicants were seeking jobs for which there are less than 5, 000 vacancies.  And that sums up the social terror of youth unemployment put officially at 23% but which may be as high as 45%.  It is tempting but dangerous to dismiss Bola Tinubu’s warning quoted above as political rhetoric, especially in the light of the deadly stampede at the immigration screening centres which rendered it prophetic.

To be sure, there is a global dimension to unemployment which the International Labour Organisation puts at over 203 million at the end of last year.  Disturbing still is the fact that in 2013 alone, the number of unemployed people rose by 5 million, one of the highest in many years. ILO’s warning of a jobless recovery in the advanced economies finds its correlate in Nigeria’s jobless, high growth.  Our economy is caught in the trap of impressive but non-inclusive growth, that is also not creating jobs.  President Goodluck Jonathan’s claim to have created 1.6 million jobs in 2013 was hotly disputed on social media by unemployed youths who asked scornfully: Where are the jobs?

Even if Jonathan’s claim is verified, it still falls short of what is required to roll back the tide.  For example, at the just concluded 20th Summit of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group, Foluso Philips, Chairman of the Group disclosed that Nigeria requires to create 24 million jobs in the next 10 years if it is to reduce by half the country’s gargantuan unemployment crisis. That gives us a yearly target of 2.4 million jobs to reach a 50 per cent rollback of the swelling army of unemployed.

That is not all.  If you take a quick look at the ILO survey, you will discover that the countries with the least unemployment figures are those in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as those in Asia.  What does this tell us?  It returns to the debate about unemployment, the issue of the nature and character of the State since the countries in the regions mentioned are either emergent left of centre governments or the developmental states of Asia which have clear social welfare credentials as well as privilege the closure of the gap between the affluent and the have-not.  In other words, it is likely that there is a connection between the current neo-liberal growth strategy and our escalating unemployment considering that growth does not automatically translate into jobs unless there is a conscious effort and plan to draw the connection.

At a recent workshop attended by this writer in Osogbo, Osun State, one was pleasantly surprised to discover how job creation was made the focus of educational policy through for example the construction of an extensive garment factory employing designers, tailors and allied artisans perhaps the biggest of its type in West Africa. The brief of the workers is to design standardised school uniforms for the schools in the state; but it is of interest in the context of this discussion that an elaborate job creation mechanism had been aligned to it as well as to an equally far-flung schools feeding system which generates employment for caterers, food vendors and farmers with a value chain built around the project.

The point then is this: Jobs cannot be created in the haphazard, lack-lustre manner in which the government at the centre has hitherto approached the matter. It connotes consciously formulated policies, energetically directed to yield backward and forward linkages which generate jobs and alleviate poverty.

This is the lesson to take home from the recent immigration jobs tragedy.