Since graduating from university in 2015, Oke Taiwo Sulaimon has worked part-time as an economics teacher. For the past seven years, in order to provide for his family, he has been teaching the subject to students of two secondary schools two days a week.
His wife contributes a portion of her earnings from her fashion design business, and the two of them have been able to raise their three children together.
Employment is one of the most important economic indicators used to measure the health and performance of any economy. In Nigeria, high unemployment and underemployment rates have adversely affected the disposable income of families and eroded their purchasing power.
This month, Sulaimon and 84 other young Nigerians became owners of tricycles, popularly known as ‘Keke’, after participating in the ‘OBJ @85 Free Keke Programme’ organised at the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library in Abeokuta to commemorate the 85th birthday of one of Nigeria’s former president and statesman, Olusegun Obasanjo. They entered the online competition, which was open to Nigerian youths from all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.
For Sulaimon and the other winners, the tricycles will impact their lives positively either through the enhancement of the work of their hands or the provision of funds to invest in other ventures.
“This will go a long way in changing my life,” said the 33-year-old man from Badagry in Lagos State. “I will give it to an operator and plan to save the money that will come from it to further my education.”
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Over time, Sulaimon hopes to up the scale of its business by getting another tricycle from the revenue that will be generated from the one he won. The tricycle winners come from a variety of backgrounds and situations. However, a common factor that binds them together is their need for someone to assist them to rise above their current situation.
Many of them, including Sulaimon, are among the 28.6 percent of Nigerians the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) categorised as underemployed in its latest data. That is, such persons have some form of work they are engaged in, but it isn’t enough to support them.
The unemployment rate in Nigeria increased to 33.30 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020 from 27.10 percent in the second quarter of 2020, according to NBS data.
Compared to other age groups, unemployment is highly felt among those between the ages of 15 and 34, who make up over 65 percent of the country’s population of over 200 million.
Data from NBS show that the number of unemployed young persons increased by 220 percent to 12.8 million in Q4 2020 from 4.0 million in Q2 2015.
Sulaimon’s case is similar to that of another winner, Asambe Ngumimi. The 30-year-old female winner from Benue State has been operating PoS terminals at different locations in that state for about three years. But she needed a boost to grow her business. She said the tricycle would assist her in taking her business “to the next level.”
“It will change my life because apart from using it for my own business, I can also rent it out to make more money for myself. People can rent it to help them move their goods from one place to another,” she said.
Over the years, Keke or Keke Marwa has become a major means of transportation in Lagos and many parts of the country and has been a tool of empowerment for many Nigerians in both urban and rural areas. “Keke” is the Yoruba word for bicycle, and ‘Marwa’ is the surname of the then military administrator of Lagos State, who introduced the use of tricycle as a means of commercial transportation in the 1990s.
As Sulaimon, Ngumimi and others set out to learn how to drive the Keke or employ drivers to operate it on their behalf, they are entering into a new phase of their lives, where they would be rendering service for which a few months ago they probably lacked the capacity to deliver.
Whether they operate in the city or rural areas, they will be looking forward to the profits that each automobile on the road will bring them, and what they do going forward will be entirely their decision.
“It is not the opportunity that matters most; it is the use that you make of the opportunity,” the former president told them.
