The Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Mr. James Ocholi,
SAN yesterday said that there is no reliable statistics on unemployed
youths in the country.
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| Mr. James Ocholi, SAN |
The minister stated this at the All Progressives Congress, APC
national headquarters in Abuja where he fielded questions from
journalists on how the ministry is carrying out its mandate of job
creation so far.
He also spoke on the federal government’s plans to employ non-trained
teacher graduates as teachers, for which President Muhammadu Buhari
spoke on during his budget presentation at the National Assembly.
The APC government had during the electioneering campaigns promised
to pay N5, 000 stipend per month to indigent Nigerians and to create
employment.
According to Ocholi, the Teacher Conversion Programme is meant to mop
up graduates who do not have employment but possess degrees in relevant
areas that can be used to teach secondary school students.
The minister who decried lack of data of unemployed youths said, “Before we got to where we are, there was no data anywhere.
There is no data of the unemployed. In fact there is no data of the employed. It is a bad situation”.
He however stated that the Ministry has started the process of
gathering data of the unemployed and the employed Nigerians as he
stated: “As l talk with you, there are experts working on the software
on the various things which we have discussed with them on how to
capture the details of the unemployed and the employed. And for those
who are employed, there are many who are in wrong places; there many who
are in job and they are not enjoying the job and who want to have a job
better than what they are doing.
“There is a firm that we have sourced for, working with the National
Directorate of Employment, NDE right now. NDE has done a pilot scheme in
Bwari and they have an office in Lobito crescent right now working in
preparatory for a mega scale on job proffer”.
Asked when the data would be ready for the ministry to commence its
mandate, the Minister said, “What it takes to get that data ready is
part of our work. Our work does not begin when the data comes out
because the data itself does not employ people”.
On what the ministry is doing on the skill acquisition centres, he
said, “So we have decided to identify how many skill acquisition centres
we have in this nation, then we know the capacities of each one. There
are several of them more than 76 of them but we have also discovered
that Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs has a lot of skill centres in the
Niger Delta region which were built by the Ministry but they do not have
capable hands with resources, with skills to be able to train. Minister
of Agric has several and even the Ministry of Finance.
“So we have decided to do a memo to the SGF for Mr. President to
galvanize all such centres and bring them to one fold. Then we can do a
planning on how many each centre can take for the next three months. We
will look at what is the nature of the skill that can be acquired within
the period of time, what do we do to sustain those people that will
acquire the skill and while acquire those skills what stipends can be
paid to them to keep them in the training so that while being trained
you earn something. That will bridge the gap between now and when they
open their shop and begin to employ labour”.
by Andrew Essien
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