The end of the Cold War in the late 1990s was such an epochal event that it produced a wave of optimism throughout the Western world, at least, that the clash of civilization was over and the Western concepts of capitalism and liberal democracy have proven to be the best models for human societal organization. The way forward for the world was therefore clear: the worldwide growth and promotion of liberal democracy and free trade will ensure peace and prosperity for all. Such triumphalism is captured in the writings of Western liberal democracy scholars as Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History”.
However, a journalist, Robert Kaplan, in a provocative piece in 1994 in The Atlantic “The Coming Anarchy” challenged this naivety and complacency by showing how the disintegrating social and political conditions in West Africa are actually the way of the future for most of the planet. In his words, “West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real “strategic” danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism.”
Although the gloomy picture of crises, wars, and miseries Kaplan predicted were said to be wide off the mark, his analysis of the situation in West Africa at the time showed that the region needs to pay serious attention to the problem of youth unemployment. Twenty-three years after, the problem has ballooned and is now threatening the social order. Just that this time, it is not unemployment alone, but also a youth bulge with skills deficiency and with no hope of playing any meaningful role in the society.
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The statistics is baffling; about 40.9 per cent of Nigeria’s almost 180 million population is estimated to be 14 years and below and 70 per cent below 30 years. There are currently approximately 20 million and 10 million children in primary and secondary schools respectively in Nigeria. Roughly 1.8 million sit for the West African Examination Council exams yearly for only 250, 000 university places.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate (officially put at 14 per cent but which most analysts put at about 50 per cent & young people constituting over 50 per cent of the total number of unemployed Nigerians) has continued to rise as much as underemployment and population growth. Beyond the fact that there are very few formal jobs for the millions of school leavers every year, our almost dysfunctional educational system – which in any case prioritises rote-learning over development of real and soft skills – inadequately prepares school leavers for white collar jobs as the only option of work. Unfortunately, these youth have no vocational or entrepreneurial skills to set out on their own and perhaps create successful businesses and become employers of labour.
Therefore, the Nigerian youth is increasingly being confined to the margins of the Nigerian society, incapable of playing any meaningful role in the political, economic, social and cultural processes of the society and becoming what Donald Cruise O’Brien describes as the “lost generation”; a disempowered, stunted, and now bitter youth with fewer access to the means of becoming adults and their ‘youth’ at “risk of becoming indefinitely prolonged”. As I argued elsewhere, “most of these youth become trapped in the vortex of ‘youthness’ even when they grow older since they continue to appropriate the space of youth as a means of accumulation. In Nigeria’s Niger Delta, for instance, where violent insurgency is shaped by the politics of extraction and rent seeking, remaining a ‘youth’ even when one is above fifty (50) years of age is essential to remaining relevant as violent youth groups have supplanted local or community elders as real sources of power in the oil producing communities.”
Of course we do not need to be told that the situation described above portends great danger for the country and is a time-bomb waiting to explode. A country as populated as Nigeria is cannot afford to ignore the education, capacity development, and proper integration of its young ones into society and expects peace and harmony to reign in that society. As Tunji Adegbesan, former Director of the Centre for Competitiveness and Strategy at the Lagos Business School and now MD of a mobile education start-up firm, Gidimobile often says: “what worries me most about Nigeria is not infrastructure but our ability to provide our many children with the tools to survive and thrive. If we like, we can fix power [electricity], fix all the roads, but omit to fix [read education and jobs] of the over 80 million children, the Boko Haram insurgency will look like child’s play. We will just be providing kids with excellent infrastructure to use to murder us all.”
The problem is beyond complaining and urging the government to do something. It requires a coalition of relevant actors from different spheres: the government, corporate bodies and businesses, universities and schools, civil society and even international organizations who are willing and ready to learn, share knowledge, and implement programmes based on evidence about what works in addressing the problem, and leveraging this shared understanding through increased investments in more effective and sustainable solutions.
But this is not a peculiar Nigerian challenge. It is a global problem. For instance, unemployment in the European Union is as high as 25 per cent with some having as much as 25 per cent of their youth out of work. Surprisingly, recently, it was revealed that there are about 2 million unfilled vacancies in the EU and that some employers are so desperate to find skilled workers that they have to look outside the EU borders. This leaves European policy makers and analysts really worried about the capacity of European youth to fill the available vacancies.
Similarly, a recent McKinsey survey of over 2800 employers across the globe revealed that 4 out of 10 employers cannot find workers to fill entry-level positions in their firms. Specifically more than one-third of respondents stated that their businesses were experiencing limitations because of the absence of appropriate skills. Such surprising revelation even in places we’d hitherto thought to be overflowing with abundant skills provide an insight into the nature as well as pattern of unemployment and the shortage of skills globally.
However, the crucial difference between Africa, particularly Nigeria and the rest of the world is that Africa has the highest share of the world’s youngsters. Nigeria, for instance, have over 70 per cent of its population is under 30 years. Sub-Saharan Africa and to some extent South Asia accounts for the larger percentage of the world’s 262 million youth between the ages of 15 to 24 estimated by the World Bank to be unemployed. Sadly too, Africa has the most unskilled of the lot. Nigeria’s population will keep growing and will exceed that of the United States by 2050, placing Nigeria as the third largest country in the world.
How then can we create job opportunities for our youth and equip them with the necessary skills to take those jobs? How do we plan for the changing nature of work in the future and the skills required for the jobs of tomorrow? How do we train our young ones to be innovative, to always search for ways to unlock opportunities in the economy and to create a new markets and economies for the future that is not mono-product or dependent on oil like today’s?
The first huge task is to urgently fixing the education system. Education, says William Yeats, “is not the filling of a pail but rather the lighting of a fire.” Parker Palmer, the great educator and writer, was categorical in the right kind of education students require. “Tips, tricks and techniques are not at the heart of education – fire is. I mean finding light in the darkness, staying warm in the cold world, avoiding being burned if you can, and knowing what brings healing if you can. That is the knowledge that our students really want, and that is the knowledge we owe them. Not merely the facts, not merely the theories, but a deep knowing of what it means to kindle the gift of life in ourselves, in others, and in the world”
For Pai Obayan, Emeritus Professor in the Institute of Education at the University of Education, we must de-emphasis rot-learning, factual knowledge and specific subject matter and emphasise more the learning of fundamental, technical and inter-personal skills (language, mathematical reasoning, scientific and social enquiry, analysis, communication, inter-personal skills and general emotional intelligence) to enable the individual function in socially and professionally heterogeneous work settings.
This is a job of the government, educational institutions and employers. The Nigerian education curriculum has to change or be reinvigorated to emphasise the teaching of entrepreneurship, vocational skills, critical thinking, leadership, communication and soft skills from inception.
The problem may be that there is, as yet, no any form of collaboration between educational institutions and employers to allow employers communicate clearly their skills requirements to the educational institutions. Hence, the educational institutions churn out graduates that do not have the skills required by employers and have no skills to become self-reliant or entrepreneurs themselves. Perhaps, we have a lot to learn from the German model.
Germany’s vocational education programme is a dual system whereby students learn in the classroom and also learn by doing. Typically, trainees attend vocational school one or two days per week, studying the theory and practice of their occupation as well as economics and social studies, foreign languages, and other general subjects. They also do a working apprenticeship in their chosen field where they receive about one-third of the salary of a trained skilled worker.
Germany policy-makers know that not all students like or flourish under the traditional studies system. They realise some clearly don’t have aptitude for college or academic work but are great with their hands. But they see all the kids as potential assets who will shine if they are matched with the right vocation. And it created a system – a strong partnership of employers and unions with government – to do the matching and provide the necessary training. It is not surprising that a majority of German students (some 51.5 per cent) choose this path and Germany has perhaps, one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world.
But even if the education system is re-jigged and students are trained to the specification of employers with many others taking to vocational education, where will the jobs come from? Formal sector jobs are very hard to come by. That means there should be more emphasis on entrepreneurship and the development of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SME). In globally competitive economies, the SME sector provides the highest number of jobs. But in Nigeria, the sector has been strangulated by the policy environment. Nigerian banks have no appetite for long-term lending or for lending to the SME sector. They prefer to lend to importers and to the oil and gas sectors where they can make quick and eye-catching returns. For the few that do, interest rate is as high as 21 per cent. Tolerance level or rate for non-performing loans is at a meagre 5 per cent. Clearly, both the government and the banks must work together to make it easy for small scale businesses to start and survive. The interest rate must drop and the risks ascertaining criteria and tolerance level for non-performing loans must be made less stringent.
Since businesses ultimately cannot succeed in a society that fails, businesses have a responsibility also to teach and support the SME sector. Finally, as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility, they must encourage, support, and propagate the use of information and communication technology for learning and skills enhancement. Though a bit disruptive to the status quo, technology presents great opportunities to create new offerings, reach new audiences outside traditional learning communities and has the capacity to ramp up capacity and national skills levels.
Perhaps that is why Tunji Adegbesan took a break from a flourishing academic career to create an educational mobile app – Gidimo – to fill the learning gap in the society, to develop capacity and democratise opportunities for the masses of school kids in the country.
Also, worried by the problem, the Lagos Business School First Bank Sustainability Centre in partnership with FirstBank Nigeria last year hosted a CEO Business Roundtable on empowering youths and solving unemployment, through education and skills development. There were lively analyses and discussions of the problems and many corporate organisations shared their experiences of the problem and what they are doing or are willing to do to bridge the gap. At the end of the round table, four concrete actions were recommended:
• Business Collaboration with Ministry of Education and Tertiary Institutions
• Focus CSR/sustainability projects on grooming SMEs and young business leaders
• Support and revamp vocational schools
• Collective business involvement in policy development on youth empowerment and education
Chris Akor
