Unemployment has been with Nigerians for the past 57 years of our independence and it’s yet to receive any working solution from the government.

The Army of unemployed youth in the country is growing at a fast speed and it’s not getting the desired attention.

Successive Governments have promised to stamp out unemployment in the country, meanwhile, the menace is still growing in leaps and bounds.

Government have implemented various programs aimed at eliminating unemployment in the country which has failed to address the challenge of unemployment due to the non-sincerity of government with such programs which is usually politicised with beneficiary chosen on political affiliation and ethnic colouration. As a result, such interventions rarely exceed the life of an administration.

The last of such intervention was the YouWin programme of the Goodluck Jonathan administration. The program failed to address the main issue of unemployment as expected as it was more of an elitist approach to solving unemployment. The program died a natural death with the loss of the 2015 general elections by President Goodluck Jonathan.

The succeeding government of President Buhari introduced the N-Power scheme in 2015 and has benefited a paltry 200,000 Nigerian youth out of the over 10 million unemployed youth in the country. The N-Power scheme is another elitist approach to job creation like the YouWin program which impact won’t be felt on the long run.

Eradicating unemployment in Nigeria requires a mass approach that will take millions off the street and place them in a sustainable job not a temporary job like the N-Power which is designed for a two year period with a stipend of N35,000. After two years they will be unemployed again.

Is that what we term eradicating unemployment? In a country with high standard of living like Nigeria, how will N35,000 be enough to spend and have savings?

Federal legislators are earning about N30 million monthly. N30 million is enough to create jobs for sixty SMEs startups at N500,000 each. These SMEs will end up employing individuals to work for them.

These are working solutions, not the elitist approach the government is using that is having little or no effect on the economy. The government must show readiness to tackle unemployment, failure to tackle it may spell doom for the country.

Editor