Mr. Donald Trump, a Presidential aspirant in the coming US election was asked how he is going to create jobs in the USA, he replied “I am just gonna do it.”
The art of job creation is a serious issue that most of us, Nigerian electorates overlook during electioneering campaigns yet it should be a singular most important thing.
The number of people one is able to pull out of poverty largely lies with the number of jobs created. It is not just enough to mouth the mantra of job creation without a corresponding decrease in poverty level.
Assuming Mr. Trump whose antecedents as a successful businessman, with several thousands of workers, decides that it is a trade secret that he will keep to himself till he becomes president, what reason could the Nigerian politicians have not to explain the strategic plans to create jobs, since their antecedents shown they are unlike him.
I have not heard from past and current political leaders of Nigeria, what plans or number of jobs they created or plan to create, the nearest to that was in a speech by the Niger state Governor Abubakar Sani Bello, who said he will train 370,000 entrepreneurs every year.
This figure I suspect was really outrageous and definitely not realistic, even though the strategy for doing that is not yet out. His lamentations over lack of funds are enough to put a spanner in that works. I am sure the figure in that speech was carefully inserted to make it look appealing to the teeming Unemployed youth of the state.
If 370,000 were to be trained in entrepreneurship par year, it would then mean that more than 1,4000,000 youth would have been trained in four years, and the corresponding cost of training would be about 11.1 billion Naira every year, ceteris paribu, and assuming the training is to last three months on a tuition of 10,000 Naira par month for three months.
This is without talking about monthly civil service salaries and emoluments, minus cost of essential services like Medicare, water and sanitation, emergency services, schools and etcetera.
Yet, that amount is only on entrepreneurship, what about the skills for which the entrepreneur will add value, what about the centres of training, what about logistics and what about the fields of required training?
The idea of job creation should be first on skills acquisition within which entrepreneurship training will be enshrined so as to make the trainee knowledgeable enough to manage the skills which he or she has been given and there from make profit for a living.
It is only pitiable that most of our political leaders only mouth the idea of job creation without knowing what It will require and Unlike Mr. Trump, most of them are only traders and merchants whose businesses engage a couple of hands.
So even if they answer like Mr. Trump that they are just gonna do it, their antecedents has not shown that they can really create the number of jobs they most times promise. [myad]
