30 April 2008
Lagos — COOPERATIVE societies have been urged to create job opportunities for the nation's teeming unemployed youths, like their counterparts in France, Italy, and Kenya.
The President of the Business Guide and Logistics (BG&L) Cooperative, Mr Paulinus Eze, who made the call during the formal launch of the body in Lagos, said millions of unemployed youths can be gainfully employed within the co-operative movement, instead of relying on government for jobs that cannot be available.
"We should, therefore, in our country, begin to realize the critical role of cooperatives as catalysts and mobilizers for economic and social development of the country," he said.
According to him, government has been saddled for too long with the responsibility of creating jobs for millions of the citizen, stressing that it is a responsibility which government finds more and more difficult to sustain in the modern world of shrinking resources and dwindling opportunities.
"Here is where the co-operative movement has a very important role to play. Co-operatives being aggregation of people of like minds coming together in order to achieve "economic, social or cultural" ends, can easily pool resources together to embark on various economic activities spanning manufacturing, financial service, real estate development, commercial activities etc.," he said.
On government's poverty alleviations programme, he said "the poverty alleviation programs are not achieving their aims, the cooperative societies are not meeting their demands, the Co-op, community and peoples bank did not survive, that all these efforts were not achieved because the masses were not carried along."
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