By Chuks Ehirim
Assistant Editor, North
Minister of State for Labour and Employment, James Ocholi, says there is no data on youth unemployment in the country even as there are plans to employ untrained teacher graduates.
He made the disclosure when he visited the national secretariat of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Abuja.
President Muhammadu Buhari first spoke of untrained teacher graduates in his presentation of the 2016 budget to the National Assembly (NASS) on December 22.
The APC had also promised during the election campaign to pay N5,000 stipend per month to indigent Nigerians and to create jobs.
Ocholi explained that the Teacher Conversion Programme is to mop up graduates who are not employed but have relevant degrees to teach in secondary school.
“Before we got to where we are, there was no data anywhere. There is no data of the unemployed. In fact there is no data of the employed. It is a bad situation,” he said.
Now, “there are experts working on the software on the various things which we have discussed with them on how to capture the details of the unemployed and the employed.
“And for those who are employed, there are many who are in wrong places; there are many who are in jobs and they are not enjoying the jobs and who want to have jobs better than what they are doing.
“There is a firm that we have sourced for, working with the National Directorate of Employment (NDE). The NDE has done a pilot scheme in Bwari and has an office in Lobito Crescent working in preparation for a mega scale jobs.”
Asked when the data would be ready, he said: “What it takes to get that data ready is part of our work. Our work does not begin when the data comes out because the data itself does not employ people.”
On skill acquisition centres: “We have decided to identify how many skill acquisition centres we have in this nation, then we know the capacity of each one. There are several of them, more than 76.
“We have also discovered that Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs has a lot of skill centres in the Niger Delta region which were built by the ministry but they do not have capable hands with resources, with skills to be able to train.
“The Ministry of Agriculture has several and even the Ministry of Finance.”
Ocholi added that a memo has been written to the secretary to the government of the federation for Mr president to galvanise all such centres and bring them into one fold. Then we can do a planning on how many each centre can take for the next three months.
“We will look at the skills that can be acquired within the period of time, what to do to sustain those people that will acquire skills, and what stipend can be paid to them so that while being trained they earn something.
“That will bridge the gap between now and when they open their shop and begin to employ labour.”