THE MONSTER CALLED UNEMPLOYMENT

THE MONSTER CALLED UNEMPLOYMENT


I like to appreciate everyone for visiting our blog; your comments have been very helpful. In my last publication I discussed the impact of slave mentality in our society, and did close by saying Nigeria needs to be selling something, so we can create wealth as well as reduce the number of idle hands we have in our society today. Today, our subject of discourse is unemployment, a monster we have grown to know.
The oxford dictionary 2010 has described unemployment as a state of not having a job, and wealth as the state of being rich and affluent, having a plentiful supply of material goods and money. You will agree with me that these two tools (unemployment and wealth) used in measuring sustainability of a nation, are so far apart in Nigerian context today. Birth rate kept growing at a very alarming rate, increasing the realities of having more unemployed in our society not to talk of crime, the resultant effect of having so many idle hands.

Unemployment as a result of a Failed Educational System
I still remember my dad telling me I had to go to school so I can be successful. So, I worked hard to pass my SSCE and got admission into higher institution, my thoughts were, there is a ready job waiting for me at graduation. In fact, I believed I’ll be recruited even before my graduation year since that was my dad’s story and he was also looking forward to me having the same experience. I made up my mind to be outstanding in all my courses, but I later learnt after having waited for six months without a job that my dad’s information wasn’t complete or my case was different from his, it was as if no one was willing to engage me with my good grades. The reality was, there was just too many of us looking for the same job, we were all unemployed. I began to ask myself how I got here, how come my professors at the university never told me I’ll have to queue up for jobs.
Then, I found out all our education system permit my lecturers to teach me is how, what, where and when to produce goods and services, they never saw me as a product that would need to be sold. So knowledge of how, when, what and where to sell myself as a product was the 50% balance of my education I had to learn all by myself after having paid hugely for it. It dawned on me I have been paying for an incomplete education, so everyone with a job has actually been selling something through their services to the company they work for or a product they are selling.
I made up my mind to begin to sell, but since I don’t have money to start the production of a product or have sufficient funds to distribute an existing product, my last option was to sell my services through the skills I acquired in school, and before I knew it, I was selling, and could even use extra hands.
Our educational system has been producing half-baked graduates, they feed them with all the knowledge they can use in solving production problems, which are; HOW, WHAT, WHEN, and WHERE TO PRODUCE, but forgot that no matter how huge our production was, if we don’t sell, it doesn’t yet translate to wealth:
(Profit=Total revenue- Total cost)
which is the primary aim of every business, individual or society. We blame our government for not providing us with employment opportunities, but I beg to differ because as far as I know, our government cannot engage all employable youths in our society, they can only institute policies that will create opportunities, and that they are even failing to do.

The Effects in our Society
The list of the effects of unemployment is so huge that I don’t desire to discuss it anymore, it saddens my heart anytime I look back at how our able hands trained to produce goods and services meant to add to the wealth of our nation has now turned to hands perpetrating ritual killings, kidnap, rape, armed robbery and the baba of the baba is Boko-haram, a menace burning our nation and stealing our destiny day-in day-out are as a result of unemployment.
The Gap between Poverty as a result of unemployment and Wealth
I gave a mathematical expression of wealth creation which is total revenue minus total Cost; where total revenue is defined as the sum total of proceeds from the sales of goods and services while total cost is the sum total of expenses put into the production of goods and services. The left over is what is referred to as profit which I call wealth in this write up.
Our nation will never grow until we understand we must keep selling at a cost higher than our production cost and reduce purchases beyond our shores. We must begin to produce our products as gradually as possible, because both the total revenue and total cost stays within our shores, the profit will be added to our GDP (economy), it is then the ripple effect will be felt in the lives of our average Nigerian.
They told us our GDP has increased to about $509billion, but we can’t feel the impact on an average Nigerian’s per capital income yet, because a huge part of this amount stays in the hands of a little fraction of our population that understands the secret of wealth creation, and are actively using it to dictate the price we pay in exchange for goods and services. They own the big corporations in our nation today because, they knew the secret (producing and selling). You will notice big companies producing or importing most of our consumables and other products are owned by very few Nigerians, and they’ve kept us hostage with our taste in electricity, food, clothing, and other stuffs we use to forge our survival on a daily basis. The bulk of proceeds from the sales made, they invest outside the country where it is been used to better the economy of other nations. They kept doing this and hoping we would wake up from our slumber someday but sadly we never did, instead foreigners saw the opportunities with our green pasture while an average Nigerian saw the nation as a desert, we are so blindfolded.

This few wise men, dictate how much we buy our cement, food items, clothing, and other daily needs. They produce or import them so it’s easy to dictate how much we the fools must buy to keep them wealthy, since we had no regulatory body checking them and even when they do all they need is a big envelope. Sometimes when they want to check their control on the market, they will create artificial inflation and before you know it, we are dancing to their tune, we kept enriching them. They found out we loved western life style, so they kept selling at their price since we are keen on living western. We wanted furnitures made in China, tiles from Italy, phones from China, cars from Japan, Korea and the likes.
We gradually transferred our wealth to other nation through our purchases. Our country has now become a dumping ground for Tokunbo foods, cars, clothes, shoes and even human beings since they know we have no choice we’ll take it since we are not producing and we’ve got to eat to sustain our survival.

I ask again, what happened to promoting our Adire, Ankara and Aso-ofi, what happened to promoting our Ofada rice, What happened to fine tuning our educational system In such a way that it promotes our local contents and value, we now had British, Turkish and all sort of country’s standard schools in our country, the worst is we boast of this schools than we boast of our indigenous schools. We became a lost generation.

Way Forward
First, we need to change our attitude towards our local products, heritage and culture; because it is the only way we can begin to appreciate who we are, where we came from, and what we can do as Nigerians positively.
Our lifestyle must begin to reflect a new Nigeria, a Nigeria devoid of crime and corruption; we must begin to portray the goodness in us as a nation blessed by God himself.
We must be a good prophet of our nation, how we portray it through our action, inaction and statements, say a lot about us as a nation in the eye of other nation. A reflection of who we said we are will be felt in their dealings with us.
Finally we must begin to create replicas of those products we buy abroad with the same taste and satisfaction or close to it, as this is the only way we can gradually reposition our products amongst foreign products, and our wise men should be honest in their dealings. Some of them exploit Nigerians to the tune of billions of naira, and give back as charity millions of naira, while in our foolishness we applaud them. Nigeria! We must be wise.
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