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A report from the Daily Trust newspaper on the 8th of October, 2009, has it that 23million youths in Nigeria are “unskilled, unemployed, under-employed and even unemployable.”
This report also captured that a representative of the house confirmed that the country has had no plan for youth development, apart from the National Youth Service Scheme, which engages only literate graduates of the universities. This National scheme of the government is one that is supposed to offer every graduate of the universities under the age of thirty, an opportunity to go on a national service in a state that is different from one that the graduand is already used 2. So after completing a four or five year course, it is expected that you do one year National service. But it is also expected that, while you are serving the nation, you also get some form of work experience which exposes you to the outside world, and with that, some are often retained in that places of primary assignment, providing them with employment.
What drew me to this publication is the number of youths (23 million) that are facing this calamity in the Nigerian scene. You might remember that young people account for 33.6% of the total Nigerian population which is like 47 million of the 140 million people in Nigeria. For a nation as big as Nigeria, not having any plan for the future of the young people who can’t afford an education, definitely puts a question in my heart, and I ask, what is the way forward, because it is not news that young people contribute immensely to the growth and development of any nation, one that is ready to advance in terms of its growth and development, but having almost half of its young population either unemployed or unemployable says so little about us as Nigerians.
You may be tempted to ask, why these youths are unemployable? The answer is very simple; the education standard is very low. In every ramification, it’s nothing to write home about especially in rural communities. If school education is poor, Sexual Reproductive Health information is not even a priority
These are the matters arising and should be addressed.
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