Leadership (Abuja)
Stanley Yakubu
9 January 2009
Abuja — The Senate Committee on Employment, Labour and Productivity has urged President Umaru Yar' Adua to prioritise job creation in 2009.
Chairman of the Committee, Senator Wilson Ake, made this appeal on behalf of the committee in an interview with LEADERSHIP, in Abuja .
He said the appeal became necessary in the light of growing concern over the spate of unemployment among Nigerian youths.
Ake said, while it was true that there was a global financial melt down, it was equally true that Nigeria had so much untapped resources which, when properly harnessed, could sustain Nigeria 's economy outside oil and gas.
He said: "The issue of youth unemployment in Nigeria deserves both government and private sector attention this year.
"Government has an obligation to create job opportunities or at the very least, create an enabling environment for private enterprises to provide employment for our people.
"The education sector also deserves all the attention it can get this year because we need a general reorientation.
"Our education system needs to be overhauled for us to move away from a system that produces people that only rely on white collar jobs; we need entrepreneurs who will employ labour."
He said the turmoil in the global oil market was a call on Nigeria to look inwards especially in the area of developing the capacity of the productive sector to generate employment.
Read comments. Write your own.
Copyright © 2009 Leadership. 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.
Unemployment is tied to the economy which has taken a free fall due to the reversals of existing economic policies by Yar'Adua backed by the senate. Furthermore, the senate has deliberately avoided passing necessary laws to check and prevent corrupt president, governor or any politician from looting the state treaasury and with continous corruption, the economy is in free fall.