By Badero Olusola
There is something unique about the Nigerian youths that the government is not looking into - our activeness!
ADVERTISEMENT
Over the time, I've noticed in us, the youth, the resilience and passion we put in any cause we believed so much in.
Gone were the days when sports was our area of interest. Every Tom, Dick and Harry wanted to be a footballer. Every proud father of a son wanted him to be a footballer too. I heard from history how much of passion an average young Nigerian in the 50s and 60s gave the military recruitments then, in their quest to contributing to the nation building.
After the war, the rebuilding processes were carried out by the young Nigerians across the country despite being the major casualties in the needless bloody dispute!
When the Internet came, the major players were the youth of the country - remained same to this day. Programming, software, hardware and other technological know-how have young Nigerians as reliable professionals. We have our engineers that can assemble a computer from the scratch and those that can unlock anything locked from anywhere in the world, without breaking it.
In the early 2000 when the fish farming business made its way into our national life, the youths were the pioneers of this lucrative business; many in a small scale level across the country.
Here is my point; if Nigeria want to grow according to the 21st century flow, investing on our youth alone is the answer.
With the way crude oil prices keeps being unpredictable, investing in agriculture and technology should be urgently looked into.
I am not an economist, but if the Nigerian government can invest in these two critical sectors, we will be an exporter of both technology and food in no time.
Let me break it here;
In the UK, there are different government agencies with efficiently trained officials and adequately funded to give out interest-free loans to new business start ups. If Nigeria can decentralize its source of funding small scale businesses, to smaller agencies across the country, that will deal with different business proposals that better suit their area of location. Using the 774 local government secretariats as offices for the agency will be a good start.
Then give agricultural and technological business proposals the top priority of their considerations.
There are tech gurus in Computer Village in Lagos that can develop softwares to stop the government wastefulness, like the never ending ghost workers draining our national scarce resources, but building an up to date and reliable database for the country - build and own by Nigeria, which I believe can detect fraud after all the government workers' datas must have been captured. This will be cheap and even encourage our young engineers to want to break more grounds in securing our national information. If we give technology a top priority, a Nigerian Silicon Valley may not be far from the horizon. With our population and proper encouragement from the government, Nigeria can rule the world of technology in 20 years - yes! If you doubt me, ask the people of Sierra Leone and Liberia the competency of our soldiers during their civil wars - if you don't know, 80% of the Nigerian soldiers of those times were youths.
If you encourage an average Nigerian youth to start his own farm, he will attempt to feed a nation in 2 years. We love been in charge of something, no matter how tedious or uninteresting it may be. As long as we are the chairman or the director, we will guard it will all within us. That's what makes us different. I've seen young graduates of agricultural discipline discuss their passion to changing the way we cultivate, harvest and store our farm produce. They want to build business that will make agriculture more appealing to their contemporaries - but many changed course midway because of incapacitation of funding. Those who stayed back are groaning under the hardship meeting up with the running cost. Their expenses is killing their profits and there no government support to encourage them to stay on the business.
It is only Nigerians that can change Nigeria - especially our youths.
Government should look into this two sectors.
If they are sincerely and faithfully implemented, Nigeria may be creating jobs for more than 50million Nigerians in another 5 years, and many more in the subsequent years because of the multiplying effects these two critical sectors would have on the population of jobless youths roaming our streets today.
ADVERTISEMENT
The government can't create jobs for everyone, the youths can. Just challenge them, and watch!
Maiyegun General
No comments:
Post a Comment