Achieving GDP growth through employment focus

I believe that it is important to have the promises made during the campaigns by the ruling party in focus, no matter how difficult achieving some of them may be. It is also important to come to terms with the fact that time is ticking. Organizing a government to start to work is always a […]

I believe that it is important to have the promises made during the campaigns by the ruling party in focus, no matter how difficult achieving some of them may be. It is also important to come to terms with the fact that time is ticking. Organizing a government to start to work is always a herculean task. There is politics to deal with and a president is under tremendous pressure.  

One of the major promises has to do with a double-digit growth rate for the economy, and an attainment of a trillion US dollar economy in about six years. There is always a foreboding that this may not be achievable, but we have to stay positive and imaginative.  

A multidisciplinary and multisectoral approach will have to be adopted in order to reach this goal. I believe that a focus on job creation at every level is what can guarantee this achievement. Not just jobs for jobs’ sake, but jobs that target the sectors of the economy that need to be repositioned, and jobs that will announce that this is a brand-new era by repositioning and streamlining the public sector. 

Talking about streamlining, we need to have in mind the challenges of private sector jobs, chiefly the challenge posed by Artificial Intelligence. I have always maintained that the private sector is in the business of maximizing profits even if these days we have asked many companies to take a stakeholder view approach and now run amok with profit motives. But, in the end, it’s down to the profit motive.

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Entrepreneurs do not campaign at the stumps. It is politicians that do so. Politicians may therefore, not shift the responsibility of job creation to the private sector. What we have seen other nations do is that politicians collaborate tightly with the private sector, and employment numbers are taken extremely seriously. In the US for instance, monthly employment figure is one of the most important indices, which everyone looks forward to. The government never jokes about it. When more employment is generated in a given month than expected, markets rejoice, and the government looks good. Ratings improve. 

So, the fairly new government of President Tinubu has been very active and has taken some momentous decisions, performing even better than most players expected it to. In a period of barely five weeks, we have seen some key appointments, seen the removal of petrol subsidies, the ‘floating’ of the naira, and the suspension of some taxes, in a way that shows that the government is business-friendly, with a listening ear and a finger on the pulse of the people. We have also seen new economic policy documents that indicate where the government may soon be heading.  

The key decisions have been something of a shock therapy to the economy and have spiked inflation. Some of us are scrambling to see how quickly we could push the government to start fronting the goodies that it has for the people. In other words, we should by now be rushing out with the reliefs, palliatives, subsidies, and every other idea that can make the lives of our people a little less stressful. Quite several Nigerians are losing hope, but they must be reminded that this is a government of Renewed Hope. 

I think that beyond making Nigeria attractive to foreign investors, to foreigners in general, or even getting our businesses to be able to plan with more certainty, we need to focus on job creation. The focus on job creation will have many benefits which I will list below, for clarity.  

1. If a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is calculated with the economic formula C+I+G+(X-M), which stands for Consumption plus Investment plus Government Expenditure (less taxes), plus net exports, then jobs are central to driving more consumption, and also higher taxes. Jobs are also created when we target investments in an economy. If GDP growth measures productivity, then the more jobs in an economy, the higher everyone’s productivity. 
2. If GDP is calculated as the sum of goods and services produced and sold in a country in a given year, then targeting job availability is a sure bet way of ensuring that more people are paid for the goods and services they supply into the economy. Saying that we want to increase GDP by 10% net means that we expect that producers of goods and services, as well as workers, will earn a net of 10% more than they earned last year. This means that we adjust for inflation to determine the ‘net’. 
3. What increasing GDP by double-digit (or anything close to that) means is that there will be so much buzz in the economy – like we just discovered some new resource in the ground, and everybody is suddenly awash with activities and therefore with cash. The best way to track this is through a focus on job creation. Government must have a keen focus on jobs because they will not come easily.

The private sector is in the business of profit-making but could be encouraged and egged on to create a few more jobs. We must recall that Artificial Intelligence is disappearing in many job roles today. If the government does not take job creation extremely seriously, then the economy may not grow fast enough as desired.  

4. Successive governments in Nigeria always speak about creating an ‘enabling environment’. That is an amorphous term with which government gets away with doing nothing serious about the availability of jobs. What does ‘enabling environment’ mean? It means eradicating crime – or reducing it to a bare minimum. It means eradicating corruption. It means making the country very friendly so that tourists and outsiders may come. It means targeting FULL EMPLOYMENT as we say in the field of economics. That is the hallmark of Keynesianism.

Monetarists could throw in foreign exchange reforms and removal of subsidies as part of creating the ‘enabling environment’. But targeting monetary reforms only (as we have over time), without taking on the employment issue headlong, is futile. Whereas a country may still grow its economy without hard monetary reforms but with a focus which encourages the inflow of capital and tourism.

The targeting of FULL EMPLOYMENT (where unemployment reduces to between 5% and 8%), is a valid and proven economic strategy and comes highly recommended for a country like ours. It’s all in the imagination. And we have a great opportunity to do this now, in an atmosphere devoid of disaster.

From history, we have spent our borrowings on managing disasters and economic slump, hardly to power our economy to a new level – even if we have to print and spend. Nigeria is a country where so much hasn’t been done. We must wake up, brace up and get the job done.