What do we do about our dysfunctional education system and youth unemployment?
In 1994, an American journalist, Robert Kaplan, in a provocative piece in The Atlantic titled “The Coming Anarchy” predicted the disintegration of the West African society in the near future. He based his argument on the observation of the disintegrating social, economic, and political conditions in West Africa and the rise of criminal youth gangs all across the sub-region at the time and the phenomenon of child soldiers in Liberia and Sierra Leone particularly. In his words, “West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real “strategic” danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism.”
Although the gloomy predictions of Kaplan were wide off the mark and the wars in Sierra Leone and Library were subsequently quelled – and he could even be regarded as a prophet of doom – his analysis of the situation in West Africa at the time showed that the region needs to pay serious attention to the problems of education and youth unemployment. Twenty-two years after, the problem has ballooned and is now threatening the social order. Just that this time, it is not unemployment alone, but also a youth bulge with skills deficiency and with no hope of playing any meaningful role in the society.
The statistics is baffling; about 40.9 per cent of Nigeria’s almost 180 million population is estimated to be 14 years and below and 70 per cent below 30 years. There are currently approximately 20 million and 10 million children in primary and secondary schools respectively in Nigeria. Roughly 1.8 million sit for the West African Examination Council exams yearly for only 250, 000 university places. Just some weeks ago, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board announced that over 1.85 million young Nigerians sat for the examination. With just about 400, 000 places opened in all tertiary institutions, roughly about 1.4 million of this number will join the army of the unemployed – and it is a yearly phenomenon.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate (officially put at 24.3 per cent but which most analysts put at about 50 per cent and young people constituting over 50 per cent of the total number of unemployed Nigerians) has continued to rise as much as underemployment and population growth. Beyond the fact that there are very few formal jobs for the millions of school leavers every year, our almost dysfunctional educational system – which in any case prioritises rote-learning over development of real and soft skills – inadequately prepares school leavers for white collar jobs as the only option of work. The universities are a mess and their products are being adjudged unemployable by most employers. Unfortunately, these graduates and those who didn’t go to the universities have no vocational or entrepreneurial skills to set out on their own and perhaps create successful businesses and become employers of labour.
The effect is that the Nigerian youth is increasingly being confined to the margins of the Nigerian society, incapable of playing any meaningful role in the political, economic, social and cultural processes of the society and becoming what Donald Cruise O’Brien describes as the “lost generation”; a disempowered, stunted, and now bitter youth with fewer access to the means of becoming adults and their ‘youth’ at “risk of becoming indefinitely prolonged”. As I argued elsewhere, “most of these youth become trapped in the vortex of ‘youthness’ even when they grow older since they continue to appropriate the space of youth as a means of accumulation. In Nigeria’s Niger Delta, for instance, where violent insurgency is shaped by the politics of extraction and rent seeking, remaining a ‘youth’ even when one is above fifty (50) years of age is essential to remaining relevant as violent youth groups have supplanted local or community elders as real sources of power in the oil producing communities.”
Of course, we do not need to be told that the situation described above portends great danger for the country and is a time-bomb waiting to explode. A country as populated as Nigeria is cannot afford to ignore the education, capacity development, and proper integration of its young ones into society and expects peace and harmony to reign in that society. The Boko Haram insurgency and other similar youth-propelled restiveness is now forcing us to pay closer attention to the problem. We may build all the infrastructure we like, but if our education system remained the way it is and it keeps churning out youth that can’t fit into society, we will only be providing these youth with excellent infrastructure to terrorise the society
How then do we begin to solve this problem? Beyond the call for entrepreneurship and ICT training and the involvement of the private sector in creating systems and ways to mop up the millions roaming the streets aimlessly, the real huge task is in urgently fixing the dysfunctional education system to properly train the next generation workforce needed for Nigeria and to stop adding to the millions already lost. Perhaps, we have a lot to learn from the German education model.
Germany’s vocational education programme is a dual system whereby students learn in the classroom and also learn by doing. Typically, trainees attend vocational school one or two days per week, studying the theory and practice of their occupation as well as economics and social studies, foreign languages, and other general subjects. They also do a working apprenticeship in their chosen field where they receive about one-third of the salary of a trained skilled worker.
Germany policy-makers know that not all students like or flourish under the traditional studies system. They realise some clearly don’t have aptitude for college or academic work but are great with their hands. But they see all the kids as potential assets who will shine if they are matched with the right vocation. And it created a system – a strong partnership of employers and unions with government – to do the matching and provide the necessary training. It is not surprising that a majority of German students (some 51.5 per cent) choose this path and Germany has perhaps, one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world.
Christopher Akor