Minister of State for Labour and Employment, James Ocholi, speaks on the strategies by his ministry to tackle unemployment in the land. Assistant Editor (North), CHUKS EHIRIM, presents the excerpts.
Job creation strategies
The Ministry of Labour and Employment, as the President has christened it, is focused on job creation. In job creation, you know that the greater arm that has the capacity to create jobs is the private sector; but the Ministry must create the framework and the enabling environment for that job creation. Part of it we know we can do very well is the skill acquisition. A parastatal under the Ministry of Labour has already been working on the Skill Acquisition Centre.
As soon as the Ministry got two of us on board – Senator Chris Ngige and I, we had a discussion and agreed on certain modalities we would embark upon in achieving the mandate of the President. First of all, how do we use the skill acquisition centres to derive maximum gain in training and enabling people who have certificates that they cannot do anything with? How can we get them to be skilled to be able to employ themselves and employ others? We have decided to embark on identifying how many skills acquisition centres in the nation.
Then, we will know the capacity of each. There are several of them, more than 76 of them, but we have also discovered that the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs has lots of skill centres in the Niger Delta region which were built by the Ministry but they do not have men with resources and the skills to be able to train would-be students or those who desire to acquire the skills. We have discovered the Ministry of Agriculture has several of them. Even the Ministry of Finance has some. We have decided to do a memo to the Secretary to Government of the Federation (SGF) to the President, to galvanise all such centres and bring them within our control. Then, we can do a planning as to how many each centre can train in the next three months, the nature of the skill that can be acquired within a period of time and what we can do to sustain those people that will be acquiring the skill while they change skill or while they acquire such skills, the stipend that can be paid to them to keep them in training.
In other words, while being trained, you earn something. That will bridge the gap between now and when they begin to open their shops and employ their own labour. Part of the N5,000 you hear may not actually end up being N5,000. For instance, if a graduate chooses to go and acquire a skill and is taken to a centre for skill acquisition and he was earning N18,000 or N19,000 or whatever the range is as a youth corps member, he can’t come back here and start earning N5,000. It can’t sustain him. For a graduate, he may need to get something higher to keep him or her while going through that skills acquisition centre; but for the re-training programme we talk about is a different issue.
The details are being worked out by the technocrats. This is what we intend to do. There are serious deficiencies on the number of teachers we have across the country because many people are running away from teaching because it’s either not lucrative enough or some states don’t have enough teachers and are taking teachers on contract and the salary for contract staff is very meagre. So we want to do a programme where those who have degrees in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geophysics and so on and so forth, but do not have relevant place of work akin to their training, can teach Mathematics, other sciences or Agriculture in secondary schools. We are trying to do that swap.
While you are going through the three or six months training to adopt you to become a teacher, you earn salaries.
The same thing I told you about skills acquisition centres will also apply to this job training. In this situation, the training may take them three months or six months. Whichever it is, you are already screened, you are already on the road preparing you for a teaching job, but you start earning money even before you become a trained teacher. There are several packages involved, but these are the little I can give for now. The details are being worked out. By the time we know what is getting to where and what is voted for what sub-head in the budget, we will be able to give details of what will be done.
Numerical strength of unemployed youths to be captured
Before we got to where we are, there is no data anywhere. There is no data of the unemployed. In fact, there is no data of the employed. It’s a bad situation. But as we talk, we have experts working on the software and the various things which we have discussed with them on how to capture the data of the employed and the unemployed. For those who are employed, there are many who are in wrong places. There are many who are in jobs they don’t even enjoy and who want to have jobs better than what they are doing right now.
There is a firm that we sought and is working with the National Directorate of Employment (NDE). It has done a pilot scheme in Bwari and has an office in Abuja. It is preparing for a mega scale right now on job profiling. You may have a B.Sc Biology, but your skill dictates that your real person is not a biology person, but can perform maximally if you are in administration. Yes you have a first degree in something with which you can be tempted to go into teaching, but you are not a teacher. You may have somebody who is a manager and is not trained to lead. Maybe he can be a good follower. Some people can be good followers and can impact the work place where they are working than if they are leaders. Some are leaders and the place will go down. But if you change the person to another cadre and you bring another person who is a driver on that seat, he produces well.