The youth need jobs, not prayers

FORMER Governor of Anambra State, Mr. Peter Obi’s call for prayers for our unemployed youths is not the answer to the dire situation the idle young people of our country are facing. Obi had tweeted on Wednesday, February 26, 2020 at the onset of this year’s 40-day Lenten period observed by most Christian groups towards the Easter festival: “As we begin our Lenten observation today, I urge fellow Catholics around Nigeria to remember and also pray for those killed across Nigeria as a result… of insecurity.

“Let us also put in our prayers, the teeming unemployed youths in Nigeria today, whose future is being jeopardised by the situation in Nigeria”. Though we understand the religious atmosphere of this call in which the reference to prayer is almost inevitable, we also want to emphasise that all of us, irrespective of our religious beliefs and stations in life, must deploy more of our mental and physical energies towards finding means of gainful employment for our unemployed youths. Giving a snapshot picture of the grim situation, Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Umar Farouq, last year put the population of our unemployed youths at 40 million. But Al Jazeera television network, in its February 16, 2019 edition of its “Counting The Cost” feature programme, put the unemployment for young Nigerians aged between 15 and 35 at 55.4 per cent.

With more and more of the workforce being offloaded into the job market and income shrinking among those at work due to the contracting economy, the situation gets grimmer against the backdrop of a rising population rate. With fewer jobs on offer, more idle young people pile up at the street corners. The immediate upshots are predictable: rising crime rates – violence, terrorism, kidnapping, cultism, killings, suicides, mental illness and a general decline in social etiquette and family values. The danger in doing nothing to change the jobless situation is that after a long period in the job market, educated youth begin to lose the sense of value in their education and the incentive to go to school is gradually lost. When young people are unable to even start the journey to the top, with many unable to get married and start their own families the frustration this creates is not conducive for a healthy society. The older generations which are supposed to retire and give way to the vibrant youth hang on to leadership positions and the society’s equilibrium and future are fractured. Prayer without work is dead. We must launch an emergency effort to create jobs. We must put our youth to work; gainful and satisfactory employment. Otherwise, when the social bomb explodes, no one will be safe from its devastation.

Source: Vanguard

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Oluchi Omai

Oluchi Omai is a Blogger/ Content Creator, he is a prolific writer and movie maker.

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