Beyond ‘not too young to run’, what the Nigerian youth needs

In my humble opinion, rather than the too much focus on the mirage of a legislation tagged; ‘Not Too Young to Run’ – a mirage for obvious reasons – we should channel all that energy towards ensuring legislation that would protect the interests of the youth when it comes to employment by our Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) partners among other youth empowering and emancipating alternatives.

While we should welcome all FDIs as significant partners of progress and agents of socio-economic development, we should not forget to protect the interests of our compatriots, where possible, while signing MOUs and making concessions with our foreign partners especially those from the emerging economies; the “Arab-Sino-Indian” complex of ruthless opportunists/neo-colonialists.

We can do so by advocating for a legislation or an executive order that would mandate all foreign construction firms to provide compulsory paid internship posts to our engineering graduates as well as graduates of other technical professions with their subsequent permanent absorption of good interns into such companies. More still, we can push for a quota system favoring Nigerian employees backed by Nigerian law to protect badly needed high-skill technical jobs for young Nigerians in the highly lucrative, foreigners-laden construction and other technical sectors
among others especially those of Chinese, Indian, Lebanese and Turkish origin.

It is not uncommon among firms from such countries to employ only their compatriots for highly skilled technical labor despite the availability hundreds or thousands of local -trainable- graduates in such areas and despite the adverse effects of such to our economy. This I believe, is largely due to absence of proper regulation or even awareness by the regulators (if any) of the way and manner in which such firms conduct their businesses in our country.

One may argue that this problem has to do a lot with the inexperience of our professionals, however, we need to start somewhere, and establishing such laws or policies are good starting points.

While I am also aware of the deliberate exploitative efforts by the governments of  the countries of origin of such companies (especially China) to entice our gullible public officials with highly salivating soft loans; concealed and coated with so many clauses meant to protect their fellow countrymen  as well as their industries at home, we need
to pressure our governments to bargain intelligently for our strategic national interests while signing such agreements.

It is quite disheartening to see that some of these firms (especially the Chinese) go to such an extent of employing -almost exclusively- their compatriots for even unskilled jobs that millions of Nigerian laborers are qualified for, talk less of highly technical posts that no Nigerian Engineer or professional should even dare dream of getting, all
to the detriment of the Nigerian economy.

More disheartening is the fact that our governments -at all levels- seem oblivious of the contributing effects of this to our economic problems. They are more interested in signing the projects (most at times “white elephant” projects), its publicity and the ‘smiles’ of their pockets (in terms of kickbacks from such firms) than in making sure they use such opportunities to create jobs -however temporary- to their fellow countrymen.

You need only to take notice of the billions of Naira expended on such capital projects as road constructions, bridges, buildings, flyovers and the likes, almost all contracted to foreign companies that subsequently remit all the proceeds back to their countries -perhaps due to inexperience of our local companies or other reasons best known to our
politicians – to fully contextualise the lack of tact of our leaders and/or the inadequacies of our national laws in ensuring the interests of Nigeria and Nigerians first, before any other consideration.

The government and our national policy should, therefore, ensure that such humongous amounts must, in one way or the other, recirculate back into our economy. One way of ensuring that in my opinion, is to ensure that we have legislation that will protect the interests of our people, especially our unemployed youth; a “Nigeria First” policy if possible, as practiced even in some industrial countries. This, in my opinion, will improve our technical capability and know-how as well as encourage proliferation of local world-class construction and other technical firms as we have seen from the Chinese success story.

As youth, therefore, I think we should advocate for something more like; “A Nigerian First” legislation than the highly delusional “Not Too Young to Run” mantra.

Masokano is a medical doctor at Wase Specialist Hospital, Kano