By Jerome-Mario Utomi
The latest report published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on its website which among other things noted that the unemployment rate in Nigeria rose from 27.1 per cent in the second quarter of 2020 to 33 per cent has helped Nigerians see clearly how the deck is stacked against the poor and the disadvantaged.
Aside from making it the second-highest on the global list, the NBS report, going by analysis, shows that ‘more than 60 per cent of Nigeria’s working-age population is younger than 34.
Unemployment for people aged 15 to 24 stood at 53.4 per cent in the fourth quarter and at 37.2 per cent for people aged 25 to 34.
The jobless rate for women was 35.2 per cent compared with 31.8 per cent for men. The recovery of the economy with 200 million people will be slow, with growth seen at 1.5 per cent this year, after last year’s 1.9 per cent contraction, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The output will only recover to pre-pandemic levels in 2022, the lender said.
The number of people looking for jobs will keep rising as population growth continues to outpace output expansion. Nigeria is expected to be the world’s third-most-populous country by 2050, with over 300 million people, according to the United Nations.
Unquestionably, while this quadrupling over the last five years which have attracted varying reactions from well-meaning Nigerians, remains a sad commentary by all ramifications as it is both worrying and scary, the present development demands two separate but similar actions.
First is the urgent shift from lamentation and rhetoric to finding solutions by asking solution-oriented questions.
The second has to do with the implementation of experts’ advice/solutions to unemployment in Nigeria.
This is indeed time to commit to mind the words of Franklin D Roosevelt, former President of the United States of America (USA), that extraordinary conditions call for extraordinary remedies.
Beginning with questions, it has become important to ask what could be responsible for the ever-increasing unemployment rate in Nigeria. Is it leadership or the nation’s educational system? If it is faulty education sector-driven, what is the government (both state and federal) doing to rework the policies since education is in the concurrent list of the nation’s 1999 constitution (as amended)? Are the leaders embodied with leadership virtues that the global community can respect? Or moral and ethical principles the people can applaud with enthusiasm?
While answers are being awaited, let’s take a look at what the experts are saying. As many have at different times and places argued that the rule for solving unemployment challenges has not changed all over the world. To arrest the drifting unemployment situation in the country, they pointed out that four sectors of ‘interest’ to watch are; education, science and technology, agriculture and infrastructures.
Talking about the educational system in the country, analysts are of the view that the education policies of the 6-3-3-4 system are excellent in the policy statement, but the inability of the financiers to provide the teaching tools for its success has truncated its intended goal and objectives.
However, to arrest the unemployment challenge, they added, entrepreneurial programmes should be integrated into the educational system from the primary schools to the university. Creativity, courage and endurance are skills that should be taught by psychologists to students at all classes of our educational system.
The situation says something more.
Nigeria, they explained, has to increase drastically the number of her current Polytechnics, Colleges of Technology and Technical Colleges in relation to the in-explicable very large number of universities and related academies in Nigeria’s economy in order to clearly address the training and development of professional and technical skills for technologies and industrial goods production in Nigeria’s economy.
The government science and technology development policy (with emphasis on no technology no economic progress) should be in place for promoting Nigeria’s industrial and economic development and should be focused on sustainable, well-funded and well-equipped science and engineering infrastructure complexes in all aspects of technologies and industrial goods production and manufacture and the creation of professional and technical human capital for economic development.
With the above highlight, it is important, in my views, that any country like Nigeria desirous of achieving sustainable development, must throw its weight behind agriculture by creating an enabling environment that will encourage youths to take to farming.
First, aside from the worrying awareness that by 2050, global consumption of food and energy is expected to double as the world’s population and incomes grow, while climate change is expected to have an adverse effect on both crop yields and the number of arable acres, we are in dire need of solution to this problem because unemployment has diverse implications.
Security-wise, a large unemployed youth population is a threat to the security of the few that are employed. Any transformation that does not have job creation at its main objective will not take us anywhere and the agricultural sector has that capacity to absorb the teeming unemployed youth in the country.
The second reason as noted in my recent piece on a similar topic is that globally, there are dramatic shifts from agriculture in preference for white-collar jobs, a trend that urgently needs to be reversed. Take as an illustration; over the past century in the United States of America (USA), the study has shown that there exists a shift in the locations and occupations of urban consumers.
In 1900, about 40 per cent of the total population was employed on the farm, and 60 per cent lived in rural areas. Today, the respective figures are only about one per cent and 20 per cent.
Over the past half-century, the number of farms has fallen by a factor of three. As a result, the ratio of urban eaters to rural farmers has markedly risen, giving the food consumer a more prominent role in shaping the food and farming system. The changing dynamic has also played a role in public calls to reform federal policy to focus more on the consumer implications of the food supply chain.
Separate from job creation, averting malnutrition which constitutes a serious setback to the socio-economic development of any nation is another reason why Nigeria must embrace agriculture-a vehicle for food security and sustainable socio-economic sector.
In fact, it was noted recently that in Nigeria, governments over the year have come to realize that sustainable growth is achievable only under an environment in which the generality of the people is exposed to a balanced diet, not just-food.
This explains why agriculture production should receive heightened attention. In Nigeria, an estimated 2.5 million children under-five suffer from severe acute malnutrition (sam) annually, exposing nearly 420,000 children within that age bracket to early death from common childhood illnesses such as diarrhoea, pneumonia and malaria.
For us to, therefore, achieve this objective in agriculture in ways that will guarantee food security, create employment as well as bring about development that is sustainable, the government must provide the needed support by funding, technical know-how and other specialised training.
The FG must contemplate developing a rail system that offers low fares and connection of major economic towns and landlocked cities to aid the distribution of food products and other economic products from advantaged to less advantaged areas.
Evidence abounds that such towns/cities referred to as disadvantaged often always hold the domestic trade and market prices of such commodities.
If implemented, such will assist the poor village farmers in Benue/Kano and other remote areas earn more money, contribute to lower food prices in Lagos and other cities through the impact on the operation of the market, increase the welfare of household both in Kano, Benue, Lagos and others while improving food security in the country, reduce stress/pressure daily mounted on Nigerian roads by articulated/haulage vehicles and drastically reduce road accidents on our major highways.
Jerome-Mario Utomi is the Programme Coordinator (Media and Policy), Social and Economic Justice Advocacy (SEJA), Lagos. He could be reached via [email protected]/08032725374.