When the year 2013 was winding down, I wrote an article in The PUNCH entitled, The traumatised Nigerian youths. I thought it would touch the hearts of our leaders and make life easier for Nigerian youths but it did not. The youths of that time have added almost nine years with some exiting that age bracket and teenagers entering the truly youthful age. Needless to ask whether the Nigerian environment no longer suffocates them. The country has not really moved towards a light at the end of the tunnel. The state of the economy has since gone from bad to worse. We still look back and say ‘the good old days,’ not look forward and say ‘the future looks bright’.
Since The traumatised Nigerian youths Nigeria has gone deeper into economic quagmire with enduring poverty rather than enduring economic growth culminating in sustainable economic development. The hitherto Millennium Development Goals was introduced by United Nations in 2000 for cluelessly run countries like Nigeria to have a kind of global development plan from which they can derive some inspiration to produce and implement national development plans or adopt the MDGs as a development plan.
Funding support was provided by the global body and some global financial institutions to assist in achieving some of the goals. At the end of the MDGs in 2015, the assessments showed that Nigeria, like many sub-Saharan African countries but with fewer resources, was one of the countries, globally, that failed woefully despite the said huge international resources and humongous domestic funds available to the government from oil within that period. To be sure, the goals of the MDGs were just eight and included the fight against poverty, hunger and diseases, including reducing mortality rate, illiteracy and environmental degradation, or ensure environmental sustainability, stop discrimination against women and promote partnership for development.
The Sustainable Development Goals that succeeded the MDGs and started in 2015 has some eight years left as it will end in 2030. Some of the unfulfilled goals of the MDGs were rolled over into the SDGs’ 17 goals. With constant support from the United Nations and UNDP in partnership with Japan during the COVID-19 era, Nigeria’s position in achieving SDGs was 160 out of 180 countries. The appalling results should not be surprising given the depth of official corruption going on under the government that professes to be fighting corruption! The country is managed without trusted data, long-term national plans and competent cum dedicated civil servants. And who said civil servants are not competent? They are or will be given additional training on competency, patriotism and honesty with an incentive to live decent lives after service.
So, under the SDGs, Nigeria has gone through a series of economic recessions and economic wastefulness. Instead of mobilising largely domestic funds, encouraging domestic production and engaging in fiscal discipline within the context of the precarious condition of the economy, the government continued to operate in opulence promoting consumption over production, external debt accumulation over domestic resource mobilisation and squandering of resources over frugality. The 2023 budget was prepared in the same spirit of opulence with its foundation on rent-seeking and borrowing. For example, it was easy to borrow money to finance petroleum subsidy than to inject money into the economy to produce crude oil to meet OPEC crude oil quota and meet domestic refinery.
It was easy for government to fund a jamboree to UNGA 77 as the largest contingent to the UN meeting instead of providing funds to revitalise the universities and allow the institutions to reopen. It became contingent for the government to borrow without restriction from the central bank to finance conspicuous consumption of executive and legislative arms of government with resultant massive depreciation of the naira, higher underutilisation in the manufacturing sector with consequent fall in outputs and increase in prices of goods and services. The further implications of these have produced traumatised citizens, each looking for escape routes from the hardship.
In The traumatized Nigerian youths, I explained a number of ways our youths were being maltreated by government and organisations. Governments at all levels engage in the exploitation of youths. Some state governments shamelessly employ graduates as gardeners and street sweepers on casual labour basis or political assistants without tables or designated jobs in the name of employment generation. The ‘workers’ are paid peanuts as salaries and sometimes tax is deducted as if the country does not have minimum taxable wage.
The banks used to employ graduate youths as casual or contract staff, particularly females. They throw them into the streets to solicit funds and sometimes set difficult-to-attain targets for them. They dispense with the services of these youth at will; no job security anymore. The situation is so bad in banks now that one can hardly find fully engaged staff. Most of the youths are on contract or casual and their employment can be terminated at will. A major implication is the rising fraud in these institutions that were hitherto built on trust and honesty.
Some other private organisations deliberately look for graduates for menial jobs because they believe such employees require little guidance to do their work. This is particularly true of those new foreign firms that a springing up in major cities. There are also some holiday business outfits and foreign property vendors who send ladies around airports and shopping malls to solicit customers. The remuneration depends on how many customers they were able to convince to appear in the office. It looks to me that because the Federal Government does not know what to do with the level of unemployment, it thought it is better to keep those who should be in school and be graduating soon out of school by playing games with the Academic Staff Union of Universities strike. Eventually, when they graduate with the state of infrastructure and equipment on ground, ASUU members will be blamed for producing half-baked graduates.
It is difficult to create jobs in an environment that supports, facilitates and encourages corruption and impunity. And that is the level we are at now. Every time we are told of intervention from the Federal Government, the central bank and the international community, there is no positive result. Is it that we have a basket case here? Normal poverty and now poverty trap has taken over the land.
All international economic and social statistics show that Nigeria is going down and the response from government has been to condemn such reports instead of verifying and finding solutions. Of course, those who live in affluence do not know that other people suffer. They hardly see those who scavenge from dustbins. How can people who use N100m to buy pieces of paper as party forms know that some people can no longer eat bread and beans for breakfast due to inflation caused by economic mismanagement?
A country that cannot create jobs for its citizens plays with social chaos. The tertiary institutions must now teach entrepreneurship so that all graduates can create jobs that the government cannot provide. If everybody is an entrepreneur, who will be the worker? Government must provide the environment for job creation before entrepreneurs can establish businesses. After 60 years of independence, we cannot boast of regular and available basic needs, including electricity, water, good roads, et cetera. Even, educated citizens are part of the social infrastructure and our citizens are now japa, the new name for Andrew of the past.
Our educated youths are leaving the country in droves because we cannot provide jobs for them and we also do not provide the environment to create jobs. The oil money continues to be in custody of a few individuals. The youths themselves seem complacent or sometimes they organise mushroom NGOs to promote politicians, governments or even exploit ordinary citizens through promotion of nefarious activities. The adults are divided on what to do. The elites that are supposed to show the way are complacent or compromised and the rulers (or leaders) have traumatised us so that they can just do what they like. Can 2023 be a good turning point? We don’t need manifestoes; we need a national plan to tell us where the candidate will expect Nigeria to be in the next 40 years when the country will be in a new millennium—100 years old.
Credit: Sheriffdeen Tella