Funmi Komolafe
12 June 2008
Lagos — An assessment of President Yar' Adua's agenda in respect of wealth creation and employment, may begin with our reference to his economic agenda as presented by his team.
The president's Chief Economic Adviser, Tanimu Yakubu spelt out the president's agenda: "The Challenge-Available data from Federal Office of Statistics (FOS) on Human Poverty Index (HPI) indicates that poverty incidence in Nigeria in 1960 was about 15% .
That is, only 15% of the population were living below poverty line at that time. This grew to 28% in 1980, 46% in 1985 and 66% in 1996. Current statistics (2005) show that the incidence of poverty stands at 69%.
This means that, in spite of the hike in oil prices and the accumulation of foreign reserves, 69% of our people still live below the minimum acceptable standard of $1 a day defined as the Official Poverty Line. "Action Plan, Good governance: The institutionalization of good leadership and good governance is a large part of wealth creation. Measures to remove corruption are fundamental to wealth creation. The elements of good governance include transparency and accountability, due process, probity, predictability and the rule of law.
"Skills: We will train our youths in Information Technology, Communication and Financial Skills to help attract lucrative IT and financial sector jobs being out sourced from the developed Anglo-Saxon countries. This will support our goal of becoming the financial hub of the Africa by the year 2020.
"Credit: The latent capacity of the poor for entrepreneurship would be significantly enhanced through the provision of financing in the form of micro-credit to enable them engage in economic activities and be more self-reliant; this would increase employment opportunities, enhance household income and create wealth.
"The Diaspora: Encouraging Nigerians abroad to fund projects of their choice, for example equipping schools with computers, books and laboratory equipment." Why focus on unemployment? A recent documentation of the unemployed by the National Directorate of Employment showed that, "A total of 3, 334,089 unemployed persons were registered in all the 8,812 wards in the 774 local government areas across the 36 states of the Federation and the FCT. Of the total registered unemployed persons 2,081,652 or 62.44% are males while 1,252,437 or 37.56% are females.
A close look at the returns show that Kano and Lagos states with 369,139 or11.07% and 353,097 or 10.59% respectively topped the list of unemployed persons in the exercise. These are followed by Bauchi State with 221,156 or 6.63%, Katsina State with 137,356 or 4.12%, Ebonyi with 120,072 or 3.60% registered unemployed persons. States with low registration of unemployed persons include FCT, Abuja with 34,638 or 1.04%, Kwara with 35,009 or 1.05%, Zamfara with 36, 729 or 1.1%.
NDE states, "We must be careful not to conclude that states with lower registered unemployment have less number of the unemployed. It could as well mean lower turn-out for registration or otherwise." (Ref-National Directorate of Employment - Report of the Registration of Unemployed Persons-2007). As a nation we all admit that unemployment, especially graduate unemployment, has been of major concern to all.
However, from the above stated objectives of President Yar' Adua, the first activity in the action plan appears too wide in scope and far from the reality of job creation. Except of course the President's team means job creation through the engagement of local contractors to execute jobs. Though jobs may be created as contractors engage more hands to execute government contracts, these are by no means sustainable jobs.
In a country where we do not have a judicial system that looks into any form of breach of contractual agreement, Mr. President's good governance plan cannot deliver jobs. Often government itself reneges on agreements reached. A case in point is the on-going independent power sector probe. Whereas the probe is desirable, should it lead to an abrupt termination of contracts even before the probe report is released? One does not think so.
Already, a number of those who have been engaged to work on the projects may have either lost such jobs or are already redundant. Whereas, the ideal action would have been for the probe to go on and the job as well. IT/Financial Skills: The inability of the government to put in place uninterrupted power supply is a major hindrance to IT/Financial Skill training.
As we discuss here, we are likely to do so with electricity supplied by generating sets. Skill training empowers the individual but this is not easily attained in a nation that gropes in darkness. Credit: The president's action plan indicates that his economic team has placed emphasis on jobs in the informal sector but this is dependent on a number of factors i.e. training, capital, tax incentive etc.
Apart from NAPEP, the government's poverty alleviation agency which occasionally doles out money and sometimes working tools, no organization has made any significant impact in the area of micro-credit facilities. Not even the banks that declare mega profit.
The Diaspora: Encouraging Nigerians to equip schools is simply charity which is a voluntary activity. This cannot in any way create jobs in the scale that we envisage given the magnitude of the problem of unemployment. THE WAY FORWARD The President's recent statement (his media chat on May 29) on efforts being made to tackle the problem of power supply, raises hope.
Power is crucial to employment and wealth creation but while we wait for this to materialise, other steps ought to have been taken as soon as the President assumed office.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Vanguard. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
