Unemployment in Nigeria

BY NIYI DANIELS

Unemployment by definitional approach is the inability of resourceful and able-bodied individuals in a country to be gainfully employed. It is real and without any point of doubt that unemployment is a social illness that is highly endemic in virtually all the developing nations of the world and which Nigeria is inclusive of.

The rate of unemployment in Nigeria is unimaginably higher and seems to be unmanageable when it was reeled out from the corridor of the presidency that the civil service in the country is already over-bloated, which particularly symbolises that Nigeria’s civil service system is saturated against the penchant for entry into the civil service by any prospective applicants. So it is a clear-cut indication that the monster of unemployment has cowed the authority of the federal government with the weapons to torpedo the ugly phenomenon.

Sometimes it calls for instinctual questioning to ask how can the titanic figure of 20 million of the youths of this nation be marauding the labour market without a ray of hope towards any space of engagement? Now, awareness beckons to reasoning that there are of course mirage of reasons for this.

Without any doubt, Nigeria is a nation endowed with natural resources. But the fulcrum of failure is the annexation of these resources except for crude oil that has been taken as the economic sine qua non. So if the abundant number of resources of this nation is exploited for industrial development, the bondage chain of unemployment in Nigeria should have been broken.

Another conspicuous factor is the non-development of the power sector to make up for the power requirement needed for industrial use. Electricity supply in the nation is in utter comatose and a factor which had prompted some formerly existing industries to relocate to Nigeria’s neighbouring nations where great power efficiency is available for huge production enablement.

The arrowhead of the banes in the point under discourse is the problem of bribery and corruption that has permeated the crux of the nation’s integrity. Corruptive tendency is a marked conduit for the diversion of money meant for industrial development. All the billions of naira earmarked annually for infrastructural development to promote industrial growth are usually corned into the private purse to promote self-enrichment to the detriment of the industrial sector development.

It is similarly a point of note to decipher in clear terms the gross neglect of the agricultural sector which has always been the most virile and the largest employer of labour. The millions of able-bodied Nigerian youths willing to be efficient in this sector are not getting both the financial and modern mechanical prerequisites to be relevant.

Advanced nations of the world, like Canada for instance, are recruiting personnel across their national borders to build up their agricultural sectors. Then, what is wrong with the Nigerian system where we have fecund soil and suitable atmospheric condition to bolster agriculture? But in a nutshell, the government of Nigeria is culpable for this.

The fallout effects of unemployment in Nigeria is a centrality of what has pushed Nigeria to be a cesspit of the dreaded Boko Haram and bandits. These two agents of disruption in their entirety, decimating lives and properties across all strata of the nation, have made Nigeria be included among the nations of terrorist enclaves in the world.

The contemporary pervasive internet fraud system popularly call yahoo-yahoo is a welcoming bastion of Nigerian youths who are, aside from the quest for inordinate wealth acquisition, stranded in the hopelessness of better tomorrow, and of course, this is an indicator that has dented the image of Nigeria in the arena of international reputation. Many Nigerian youths in the nooks and crannies of Nigeria are arrested on a regular basis on the criminality of internet fraud just like the Hushpuppi of our time now serving his jail term in America upon arrest and conviction.

The consequence of unemployment has made Nigeria a no-safe haven anymore with the trepidation to always watch one’s back in the anticipation of the unknown manifestation in which insecurity can manifest to the detriment of all and sundry.

It is so soul depressing how unemployment has thwarted the nation to wobble on the feet of survival and pushed it to a pratfall, in which the ray of hope of economic revival is undoubtedly immersed in the implausibility of hopeful recovery and redirection of Nigerian standard back to that saintly structure that can position the nation to occupy a rightful place of respected integrity among the committee of nations.

Niyi Daniels is the deputy commandant, peacebuilding and conflict resolution, Peace Corps of Nigeria, FCT Abuja.