Why youth must be part of development
Friedman used Taiwan as a case study. The South East Asian country has no appreciable natural resource and even has to import gravel from neighbouring China. Yet, he pointed out, it is one of the most developed countries in the world. Friedman’s logic is simple; it is that people, intelligent people, are much more valuable […]
Friedman used Taiwan as a case study. The South East Asian country has no appreciable natural resource and even has to import gravel from neighbouring China. Yet, he pointed out, it is one of the most developed countries in the world. Friedman’s logic is simple; it is that people, intelligent people, are much more valuable resource than gold, crude oil, and other natural resources. He thus made a case for education, quality education, to improve the capacity of the people, and lead to the development of the society.
There is nexus between Friedman’s thinking and that of the Minister of Youth Development, Malam Bolaji Abdullahi. Like Friedman, Abdullahi believes that to improve the lot of the youth, and therefore Nigeria, premium should be placed on training. You may call that education, which focuses on the acquisition of practical and market-needed skills. And he understands the urgency, which requires us to act fast and, to use an American phrase, throw all we have got into this.
This urgency is driven by the statistics and they are indeed troubling. There are about 68 million Nigerian youth and to put that in context, it is about twice the population of Ghana; more than the population of South Africa and bigger than the entire population of the United Kingdom. If Nigerian youth were to form a nation, it would be the fourth biggest in Africa and the 19th in the world. A formidable country by number of people, no doubt.
But it would be a poor country, one riven by unemployment and social ills. The statistics again. Of the 68 million youth, about 43 per cent are without jobs, that is about 30 million people. Of the 4.5 million young people that enter into the job market only 10 per cent are absorbed. This portends real danger. An army of unemployed and in many cases unemployable people are a walking time bomb, which could trigger off at any time. We have seen the manifestations of similar situations in the Middle East where Tunisia and some countries in the region imploded due to large-scale protests led by young people. It is noteworthy that most of these countries have better growth rate, infrastructure and lower youth unemployment than Nigeria.
But let’s leave the job situation for now and look at another issue of concern about young people. According to the Next report commissioned by the British Council, 85 per cent of Nigerian youth are unhappy with the direction of the country; 73.7 say they feel stifled and not participating fully in the decision making process and only 25 per cent identified themselves first as Nigerians. The most popular self-identification for Nigerian youth is religious (50 percent).
The profile of the Nigerian youth according to the Next report is that of an angry, alienated and idle (unemployed) person. At the expense of being trite, this portends real danger. Indeed we do not need to look to the Middle East to discover the risks of not tackling these issues from the root by developing a robust youth development plan. In the Niger delta, before the Amnesty Programme, the region was a cauldron of violence as kidnapping and other criminal behaviours thrive. Essential skilled personnel, especially expatriates, fled the region in droves. It took the well thought out Amnesty programme to restore peace in the region and kick-start the development process all over again. Even the Boko Haram crisis in the northeast, development specialists believe that poverty caused by the absence of opportunities is at the heart of the problem.
Two programmes have been designed to address these problems of unemployment and ethical issues among young people. The first is the Youth Employment Programme, which aims to empower between 250,000 – 1 million Nigerian youth in two years with the skills, experience, and business development support that they require to gain meaningful employment and start successful businesses. The idea is to ensure that they gain meaningful employment through the promotion of industry-driven training, work experience and entrepreneurship in partnership with public, private and non-profit institutions. The pilot scheme will take off this year.
The second programme is the Drive The Future Nigeria campaign, which goal is to address the ethical issues about young people. Its objective is to develop a new generation of Nigerian youth who are complete citizens in character, cultural heritage, competence, self-confidence, social connections and contribution to society. In simple English, there’s a need to build a youth who is secure and proud enough to say first, before anything else, “I am a Nigerian.” The bottom-line in all this is that the transformation that we seek will come only when we have developed our people, intellectually and morally, to drive the change.
Ogunro wrote in from Abuja.