— March 17, 2014
Did President Jonathan see the front pages of all the major Nigerian newspapers yesterday? If he did, was he able to sleep last night? Well, for the information of the president, most Nigerians who saw the photographs of applicants at the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) recruitment exercise couldn’t sleep. Nigerians are scared. They are frightened by the inexorable consequences of such level of unemployment. The augury for this country and indeed any other country in that situation is very dangerous.
This page has discussed Nigeria’s unemployment ticking time-bomb several times. I have made several desperate attempts to draw the attention of President Jonathan to the danger that stares this nation in the face. I have written several times about the scandalous unemployment level in the country. As I write this piece, at least 40 million Nigerians are unemployed. That is more than the population of Canada, Iraq, Ghana, Venezuela or Saudi Arabia. And these are not small countries by any standard. 54 per cent of Nigerian youths are unemployed and more than 80 per cent of those who graduate from universities and other tertiary institutions every year do not find employment. If the president does not see a coming disaster, then, he should not have been president in the first place.
Even those who are employed are not gainfully so. 110 million Nigerians live below $1 a day. That means 110 million Nigerians are desperately poor. When this kind of reality is presented to President Jonathan, his first reaction has always been that he met all this mess as president and that he didn’t cause them himself. Typically, he says that it is not as if when he came, there were good roads and good schools and electricity and he destroyed them himself. That is not the mindset and language of a nation’s leader. Anyone who would speak that way should not even be president of a nation ab initio. Such a person should not even be allowed to become a local government chairman. Besides, the president’s alibi is not even true. The level of corruption in the government under his watch is what has worsened everything. It is corruption that makes it impossible to invest in vital components of the economy and the infrastructure that would have lessened such disgraceful level of unemployment.
For instance, there are two issues that the president could have personally championed that would have altered the current very dangerous direction he is leading the country. I say “personally” because when there is an emergency situation in a hospital, it is the doctor that personally takes over the scalpels in the emergency room. In a normal hospital setting that is not in an emergency, the doctor can give direction to other health workers on how to handle the patient. Nigeria is today in an ultra-emergency situation.
Only desperate remedies can even begin to pull Nigeria back from the precipice. One way out is to create five million new small businesses. Small businesses are the engines of a serious economy. A small business creates between two and five new jobs, which means that with five million new businesses, you could potentially create up to 25 million new jobs. Another plausible way out is to build one million new housing units across the country. The construction of one million new houses can potentially create about 35 million new jobs as engineers, quantity surveyors, architects, mortgage institutions, plumbers, vulcanisers, cement distributors, block moulders, tiles manufacturers and sellers, food sellers, insurers, furniture makers, facility managers, gardeners, florists, security men – it’s a very long list – will be gainfully employed across the nation. And nobody should tell Nigerians that the creation of five million new businesses and construction of one million new housing units are not possible because Nigerians now have an idea of how much of their money is being stolen every day. I will not give details of how easily these can be achieved within a tenure here because I have an “intellectual property right” on these and many more.
It is not even true that Jonathan did not contribute to our current situation. When people steal in tens of trillions of naira, there will be nothing left to meaningfully create jobs and provide security for the citizens.
The immigration recruitment tragedy of the weekend is a bad omen and a confirmation of all the statistics. In one of the reports, the immigration authorities received up to six million applications for only 4,500 vacancies. The Customs has its own story; so do INEC, federal civil service, private companies, etc. Do we need to know why it is so easy to recruit youths into kidnapping, armed robbery, Boko Haram, Niger Delta militancy and several other crimes these days? It is because, for most of them, it will be their only hope for a livelihood. We are slowly and steadily but surely sleepwalking into a disaster and our president does not even know it. Or should we say, he doesn’t give a damn?
EARSHOT
Worse Than The Civil War
The situation in today’s Nigeria is worse than the situation during the Nigerian civil war years of 1967 – 1970. Unfortunately, while we had a competent leader and competent people around the leader then – including Obafemi Awolowo who was the federal commissioner of finance, Abdulaziz Atta, Liman Ciroma, Sunday Awoniyi, Ahmed Joda, MD Yusuf, Allison Ayida, Phillip Asiodu, Ukpabi Asika, etc – Jonathan, the current leader, is totally incompetent and out of his depth and his government is weakened by mindless corruption. What is worse, the very few good people around the government are not those close to him. Those in his kitchen cabinet are those doing most of the stealing and wreaking his government. Every day in Nigeria today, no fewer than 100 innocent souls are murdered in cold blood. The casualties now include boarding school students, young girls, women, market women and passersby. All these happen and the Nigerian president is completely without a strategy to prevent even the following day’s mass murders. We do not hear of these kind of mindless killings on a daily basis even in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia currently considered as the world’s most dangerous places.
The serial killings that happened last week, for instance, are now worse than what has been happening in Syria where a civil war is currently going on. And, last week, some clowns got hold of guns and attacked the Enugu State Government House, killing a few people. A few days later, they gave a press conference declaring that they were biafrans and they did what they did to send a message which is that they are still around.
Order has totally broken down in Nigeria. It is, therefore, time to engage the president in a discussion we should have had a long time ago:
1. What percentage of the police appropriated budgets has been disbursed to them since Jonathan became president?
2. What percentage of the military’s appropriated budget have they received since Jonathan became president?
3. Why is it that the Nigerian military are not well equipped for the battle against terrorists?
4. What is the cause of such low morale in the police and the services?
5. What percentage of the intelligence services’ budgets has got to them since Jonathan became president?
6. Why do we still have only about 370,000 policemen for a population of 173 million people? Does the president think this makes sense?
7. Why is it that the Nigerian military and the police once thought to be among the world’s best when they got deployed for international peace missions have now become one of the least competent in the world?
8. Why is it that state governors receive only about half of their monthly allocations these days and therefore are in weaker positions to tackle the growing insecurity in their states.
9. Or could it be that this large amount of blood that is spilled on a daily basis is being fed to the witches and wizards who have endorsed Jonathan for a second term? Remember that the spokesperson of the Witches and Wizards Association of Nigeria (WITZAN), Dr Okhue Iboi, informed Nigerians in an exclusive interview with THE UNION, the brand new newspaper out of Lagos, that they had agreed in the covens that Jonathan should have a second term. But as I said in the Earshot of January 20, 2014, the devil is a liar.
10. And, finally, does the president really, really think we can continue in this direction that he is leading the country, especially now that he even wants four more years?
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