MUBI, NIGERIA (ANS) -- I am personally disturbed to hear that someone of working age is unemployed not to talk of the multitude of unemployed Nigeria graduates who seek hopelessly for job. What it communicates to me is that such people are victims of wrong orientation or mis-schooling. How does this differ in your thinking? I mean the irrelevance of graduates to societal needs and their mismatch/incompetence to existing jobs.

Learning from our indigenous past

In our pre- colonial societies, children were brought up to adulthood prepared with relevant skills, cultural values and the know-how to engage them in relevant occupations related to societal needs and their career choice. Our history and related literatures both facts and fictions provide this understanding.

In colonial times, educated people in Nigeria had white man’s jobs waiting for them upon graduation. Such jobs and related employment were created by the colonial administration. Indigenous people who resided in their villages were engaged in local occupations like farming, weaving, hunting, fishing, music, building, traditional medical practice, traditional religious practice, music, trading, barbing, hair- dressing, making of mounds, wine tapping, palm- produce, butchering, etc. Unemployment was not then in our indigenous dictionary. The experience of unemployment in Nigeria followed much later in the post colonial era and has continued to increase defying many attempts to solution.

Urban migration for the white man’s job

The urban migration as indigenes moved from the villages to urban centers seeking for the white man’s job began during the colonial times and increased in the post-colonial era in the search for government work. The attitude of most Nigerians towards this kind of employment has been that of seeking where they will do less work or no work at all and ensuring they are in the pay-roll to receive government money which continues after retirement with pension. This orientation has created a big and bloated public sector serviced year after year by any government of the day.

The work attitude of more pleasure with less work or no work at all has corrupted and bedeviled the Nigerian system. Every seeker of employment wants to be employed in the government not necessarily for the passion serve but as a quick way to earn big money and do less work. This attitude negates supervision, work evaluation and the correction necessary for the growth and transformation of any system. From the leader to the led, the approach settles for mediocrity and crucifies hard work, efficiency and merit.

The ugly situation

Since the government and the governed in Nigeria are offspring of this unfortunate orientation beginning with the colonial era, the system has continued this way and exaggerated by terrible corrupt practices. A few Nigerians who have tried to bring change are either misunderstood, treated as enemies, humiliated, black mailed, stigmatized, pushed aside, imprisoned, shot, bombed or hanged.

This ugly situation in our public sector is badly affecting our private sector where less work, mediocrity with more pay cannot be guaranteed. For this reason, the private sector is given an inferior status and squeezed of every effort to growth after much talk about government’s concern to facilitate its development. .

Hope in the private sector

Jobs created by our private sector establishments help unemployed graduates get something doing instead of wandering hopelessly for government work, and this effort helps to reduce crime. Some private sector establishments have also grown with time by hard work and wise management to pay graduates well and keep them permanently in their employments. However, many of the private sector establishments suffer from certain laws and activities of the government which badly affect their growth and cause their winding up. The result is loss of employment for those engaged in these establishments, and the hope for future job seekers in such private sector establishments is also lost.

The reality about how we are truly developed is found more in the private sector than in the public sector. The private sector exemplifies our true efforts in self and community development inherited from our indigenous forefathers in pre-colonial times, but our present public sector apparatus is an exportation from the colonial masters which introduced discontinuity to our pre-colonial indigenous cultural system that had no unemployment problems. The imposed exportation of colonial administration and culture put a knife (Achebe) to our self and indigenous community efforts.

Alarming unemployment

Our youth started from then to migrate to the urban areas created by the white man in search of the white man’s job. The rain of unemployment and other related misery started beating us (Achebe) from then. Unfortunately, it has not abated since ever we became independent to govern our own land but has greatly increased. If the colonial administrators did some education planning to match graduate output with available jobs created by the system in order to avoid graduate unemployment in their time, I doubt if we have followed that example, or perhaps it was abandoned with time. A comparison of graduate employment then and in the years following Independence with the present situation is disturbing and raises serious questions and concern.

The alarming unemployment situation in Nigeria today calls for an education planning that must look critically at the Nigeria context in relation to our present and future needs. We must consider the demands of our labour market in our admission of students to certain programmes especially in higher institutions. Why should a student spend years, money and efforts in a higher institution specializing in an area of study where there is no available job created by the government for employment?

Problem of the foreign teacher and bad students

It appears that in pre-colonial times, our unschooled ancestors prepared their children to adulthood with relevant skills and values in relation to the needs and reality of their society and they fit without irrelevance or mismatch to cause unemployment. But, along the way foreigners replaced our ancestors in this role and schooled us out of the relevant skills meant for our real existential context and out of touch with our indigenous values, and this pattern has continued to be reproduced and badly exaggerated since after the foreign teacher was gone.

Education planning in Nigeria today must address the above irrelevance and the mismatch of preparing surplus graduates for jobs that have less demand or no demand in the labour market including the producing of in-equipped graduates for available jobs. Such planning must bridge the gaps between our school curriculum and job/career opportunities in our country.

Towards possible solution

Let me present three questions that may be helpful to assist us in reflecting on this subject with some examples towards possible solution. The first question is on whether graduates often find jobs in their different areas of specialization at school? I suppose you answered no. We cannot deny the fact that we face this situation in Nigeria. We see it at work when a graduate of Economics is a taxi driver, or a Mass Com graduate becomes a barber. One does not need a degree in Economics to drive a taxi or a degree in Mass Com for barbing.

Failure of the government and its education ministry to plan well and address needs in our existential situation make them produce graduates who become out of touch with reality, and irrelevant to our felt needs. They end up unemployed where their uneducated mates have their hands full with employment. Such graduates were engaged in the schooling process that alienated them from the existing/available occupations of our real context and transported them to where employment does not exist and hopelessly abandoned them. The remaining hope for them is to accept employment in the real world of the private sector to which many are hardly ready to adjust.

Willingness to accept available jobs

Unemployed graduates must be willing to accept available jobs in the private sector and receive what a private establishment is able to pay or they roam the streets without jobs. The sooner they adjust to this reality and the re-orientation that is part of it the better.

A relation of mine, a graduate of Electrical Engineering from one of our “prestigious” universities could not find a job of his dream in our public sector but accepted a teaching job in a private school. You cannot count him any more among the unemployed for he is now employed although not in the area of his initial preparation. However, he is learning the teaching work within the job situation as a participant observer. This is a better approach to employment in our present situation in stead of remaining jobless or joining a gang to commit crimes.

Relating school programmes to our needs

The second question seeks answer to, what can be done to bridge the gaps between a graduate’s specialization at school with available jobs? To bridge the existing gaps between graduates’ specialization at school with available jobs requires that government as the proprietor of our public school system should see that students are admitted into programmes related to our needs in society and available jobs in the labour market.

Adequate and relevant career counseling should also be given to students to enable them make responsible choices for their study programmes/specialization in higher institutions. Students should be prepared to study what they are ready to develop into employment and career for their future. This approach will help to reduce unemployment and lead someday to a wipe out of this social malady bringing an end to the accusing fingers, blame, regret, frustration, suffering and crimes that go with it.

Building good bridges between school and society

How the school system can help in solving the problem of unemployment in Nigeria is what the third question is about. Teachers should focus students’ attention on the immediate and future application of the skills they learn at school. This teaching approach should guide the students on how they can develop their future careers through the subjects they are taught. Teachers should be prepared to take students on field trips to different sites that are relevant to their future career. Through field trips students get to see the real operation sites that relate to classroom theory in application, and where jobs are available to match with what they learn at school.

Field trips have the value of motivating students to pursue their studies with greater dedication having discovered how their subjects at school are tied to their future jobs and career. Field trip can help in creating a good bridge between school and society, between school subjects and available jobs. On such bridges created by field trips, corporations, companies and other establishments get to know schools whose students are potentials for employment upon graduation. Industrial attachments can be arranged and apprenticeship can be developed for students between schools and the labor market to help bridge the gap between school curriculum and the work place.

By this approach, schools can be more familiar to society, market their products and make them user-friendly to employers of labour. This familiarization and interaction of school and society, subjects and jobs will help in reducing the anti- graduate attitude of some employers of labour that make them prefer less educated persons they train on the job than graduates. By so doing, they leave multitude of our university graduates unemployed either for not trusting their orientation at school or for inability to meet their demands. However, this is not all that stand in the way against graduate employment in Nigeria. There is also the corruption factor, but let the school do its part in bridging this gap in order to reduce unemployment of its graduates.