@Chude: Let’s talk about our 34 million problems

by Chude Jideonwo

Being a Keynote Address given by Chude Jideonwo, Managing Partner of Red Media Africa(RED) & Founding Executive Director, The Future Project at Youth Link Forum 2014 by Chevron’s Foundation for Partnerships in the Niger Delta, 14 October, Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

 

As we are expected to do at meetings like this, so that my friends at Partnerships in the Niger Delta won’t say the money they spent on flying me into Port Harcourt was wasted – let me share a few ‘deeply’ researched statistics with you.

Economic growth in Africa is expected to accelerate to 4.7% this year and 5% in 2015.

Unfortunately, this GDP growth is not translated into jobs. Take, for example, Nigeria, the giant of Africa and the continent’s largest economy.

There are at least 64 million youths in Nigeria (under-35). Over 54 percent of that population is unemployed according to the National Bureau of Statistics. There are at least 10 million entrants to the labor force per year in Sub-Saharan Africa, which causes the jobs market to become even more and more congested. Over 200,000 young people come out of schools each year. Over 90 percent of them are unable to find jobs.

Then, a majority of these new entrants into the labor market have no or limited skills for the jobs that exist. Even worse, both the public and private sectors are not expanding and creating expanding fast enough to even begin to put a dent on this problem.

The proportion of workers in vulnerable employment (this is, unpaid family workers and own-account workers) has decreased, but remains extremely high: 77.4% in 2013. Employment in Africa is characterized by informality and vulnerability, rather than by quality: only 1 in 4 have a written contract, more than half of all contracts are temporary and less than 1 in 5 are entitled to annual or sick leave.

But sebi na person wey first get work dey talk about sick leave?

The tragedy is in the original sin: over half of our young people are not in employment, in education or in training.

Findings from PIND’s own Niger Delta Youth Assessment conducted in Bayelsa, Delta, Rivers, Imo, Akwa Ibom, Abia and Edo states amongst young people between the ages of 15-35reveal the extent of the youth challenge. Of the youth surveyed, only over a quarter of youth respondents (27%) reported being employed, with a further 11% refusing to specify.

Then, if a young person decides, okay lemme start a business – what does (s)he find? A key hurdle is finding finance to start a business or to make it grow.

Nigerian banks – forget all those adverts you see on billboards – are reluctant to lend to one small boy or girl who has no collateral, who has not run a business before and who they see as likely to fail, without connections or any other backing. When they do lend, they demand your spirit, your soul and your body.

Loan repayment periods still remain very short -3 to 5years-which also limits their usefulness for start-up businesses. The effect is that, according to newspaper data monitored on both Punch and Vanguard, on average, only 1 in 10 new Nigerian businesses manage to survive.

You know what all that grammar means in simple terms? Nigeria has a big, big, big problem – a debilitating lack of jobs for its millions of youth.

But can I be honest with you? At RED, we employ 42 people across our organisations, with more than 90 percent of them under the age of 35. And we have worked with tens of thousands of youth across the country and continent over the past ten years, but in my day-to-day life, I don’t actually remember any of those statistics.

All I see, every day, is human heads, across Olodi-Apapa, Ikere-Ekiti, Ogwashi-Ukwu, Isukwuato, Gwadabawa and Chibok roaming about the streets – literally, walking about the streets, with absolutely nothing to. And even worse – nothing to look forward to.

I don’t need those lifeless statistics to tell me what I see, and what I know deep in my bones. Nigeria’s jobs crisis is not just mathematics. It is a matter of actual human lives, being destroyed, everyday.

It hit me around 2008 when I got my first post-university job, as a manager at Virgin Nigeria, and I got my first apartment – an almost-face-me-I-face-you in Akerele, Lagos. I moved into my two rooms, with my wide-screen TV, my Acs and my proudly acquired Honda … Halla and felt quite proud of myself; this small boy who grew up in Ijesha had begun to find his way in the world.

But, you know, there is something about living alone and being fully responsible for yourself that suddenly opens your eyes. I was 23 at the time, and each time I drove out of my house, I slowly began to realise, I was probably only person my age in my street renting and driving.

It suddenly hit me one day– oh, all those people I saw as I was growing up, on the streets, inside barbing salons, in front of ‘chemist’ shops, the women with their hands folded in front of them, the men with their shirts opened up… these were the unemployed. These able-bodied men and women woke up every morning, with nothing to do, and nowhere to go.

So I began to come back home early and avoid driving in late. I began to ensure I greeted my neighbours so everyone would know I was a good guy. Because it occurred to me – what happens when these armies of the unemployed and the disengaged decide they will take it out on those who they see as ‘luckier’ than them?

What happens when the legions of deprived and unemployed from the slums of Ajah in Lagos decide the suffering is too much and they spill into the priviledged estates of their Lekki neighbours and redistribute the wealth?

Unemployment is not a statistic – unemployment is those young people you see sitting on the trees in Dutse, you see standing or walking aimlessly on the laterite roads of Enugu, sitting at the dead ports in Warri, hanging around the polluted waters at Nembe, standing by the idle farms in Ikenne. Millions and millions of people just standing or sitting, watching, waiting, frustrated.

For a country already suffering violence, crime and acute insecurity, this is a crisis that can consume both the nation and its citizens. And it’s a problem for all of us.

But if you ask people what to do about the jobs problem, it is incredible to see them quickly wash their hands off – ehn, it’s government that should solve it na! Ehn, we are just here to make profit o. Okwa, me too I suffered when I was growing up?

They point to anyone but themselves. Or they blame the young people as poorly educated (“they can’t even write simple letters!”), lacking job skills, prone to violence and having an “entitlement mentality”. Well, whose fault is it that the youth are so poorly educated? Whose fault is it that they have such poor skills? Certainly not theirs. They met a country run down by their elders. They met governments with no practical vision of the future. They met classrooms with no roofs, libraries with no books, and teachers who teach the English Language in Yoruba.

So this is not their problem aloe, it is a problem for all of us.

The truth is, all the clichés aside, many young people are ready to improve on their lot, they are ready to engage with their hands, they dream of a bright future – of a country that works, of one where everything is possible, where each can grow according to her abilities, where opportunities are there for the taking.

But they see no access – to resources, to capacity to, opportunities.

What do they get instead? White papers and concept notes, talk-shops and workshops, reports and pie charts. They get governments that build one road and claim they have employed 6 million from that one road. They get power hungry opposition politicians with no roadmap for alternatives. They get NGOs that secure millions in funding and then train just 16 people. They get a private sector that outsources elementary jobs when it can invest in training born-and-bred Nigerians. They get a world screaming about #AfricaRising at posh conferences and hailing Nigeria as the new frontier, when more than half of its youth population has become the Devil’s Workshop.

At best, they get motivational speakers and prosperity preachers.

No, young people are not tired of inspiration and motivation. Is that not why they go to church or mosques twice a week? The problem is no one wants to keep going to church if miracles don’t happen every now and then. And the Nigerian youth is desperately in need of miracles.

Put simply – what we have for young people now is not good enough, and they are tired of it. It’s time to move from words and clichés to action and results.

And so, as we sit here to deliberate today, there are four crucial and thankfully straightforward questions we will have to answer:

  1. How do we aggressively create and expand opportunities for the vast majority of our jobless youth?
  2. How do we ensure that they can see the opportunities where they exist?
  3. How do we develop systems that help them take advantage of these opportunities?
  4. How do we take care of those who will inevitably be left behind?

Of course, we can’t answer the questions for over 34 million unemployment youth today, but our mandate is to clear the way.

We already know the socio-economic development issues that face young people; we don’t need a Forum to decide on that – they need jobs, they need a country that provides the basics for a wholesome living, they need the space to grow and to build wealth.

They need youth organisations and policy makers who understand this imperative and are put under pressure to find and deploy the solutions immediately. They need for their lives to increasingly get better – whether as employees or entrepreneurs or as people taken care of by a society that cares for its weakest.

At The Future Project where I am fortunate to be Executive Director, we have spent the past three years focusing on this like a crusade. Our portal Aiki.ng is presented in conjunction with Microsoft to equip young people with the skills that they need to function effectively in the workplace – including virtual interviews, training courses and downloadable resources. But we know that is not enough. We have built courses through our programme, The Future Enterprise Support Scheme, to train young people with the skills that they need in an expanding economy. But we know that that is not enough.

We have launched #StartupsAfrica, starting in Lagos, then Delta and then across the country, to look for young entrepreneurs from community to community, who can create jobs in high-growth businesses and then incubate and support them to grow. But we know even that is not enough. And we are launching, in conjunction with Jobberman.com, the ambitious Intern4Jobs programme, which we are excited about. It will connect 100,000 young people to jobs and job opportunities through internships from now till 2016.

And then there are those who make my heart sing, like Paradigm Initiative Nigeria, and the Wennovation Hub, and FACES Initiative, and Development Dynamics, and others who are seriously-mindedly and urgently engaging this problem to scale.

But even all of that is yet not enough in a country where over 34 million young people have no jobs. We need more hands on deck, and those of us whose hands are on deck need to expand our impact aggressively, radically and urgently.

Over 34 million unemployed youth?

That number keeps me awake at night. As I am sure it does you. Because if it didn’t, you wouldn’t be here today. And I thank you for refusing to be blind to this problem, for taking the time to do the best that you can to solve our nation’s most critical, and most urgent issue.

Now, because you have chosen to be part of the solution, let us make the next two days really, truly, honestly count.

Let us attack this problem as if it were a personal affront on our humanity; because it is. Let us get angry here today, as much about our missing Chibok girls as about the missing future of millions of jobless Nigerian youth.

Let us have no peace, and let us ensure the country has no peace, until we have attacked this problem with everything that we have, with all that we’ve got, with all that we know.

So that we can return to our homes and offices and know that we have done our best to avoid the oncoming war – the war of jobless youth who have had enough and are not taking it anymore.

Because when they decide that enough is enough, when they decide that this suffering has become too much, and that this should end in fire, they will not ask themselves whose fault it is that their lives are getting even worse, because they will be too angry, too desperate, and too blinded to give a damn.

We must pray that that day will never come. And then we must now put our prayer into action, today and tomorrow.

Happy deliberations.

END.

———————–

Data sources:

Foundation for Partnership Initiatives in the Niger Delta 2014 Youth Link Forum Draft Agenda

2012 National Baseline Youth Report

Unemployment: Causes & Consequences, by Uzochukwu Mike

Friends of Europe Africa Fact Sheet 2014

One comment

  1. First of all I will like to say a very big weldone to Mr. Chude for his earnest observation towards the level of unemployment in Nigeria. But for how long will Nigerian youths keep on exercising patience for the government of this country which does not even have any positive concern for its youth but rather its politicians prefer using them as a political thugs instead of finding something positive that will better their lives to engage them in.

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