The Federal Government of Nigeria led by the All Processive
Congress and Mr. President has directed the National Directorate of Employment
to register all unemployed graduates in the country.
Speaking to news men the acting Director General of the National
Directorate of Employment (NDE), Mr. Olakunle Obayan, has announced that plans
are underway to register unemployed youths across the country. This is being
done as part of the move to fulfil the promise of the federal government of
paying unemployed graduates N5,000 as social security stipend.
This
announcement was made at the official handover by the former Director General,
Alhaji Abubakar Mohammed to Mr. Olakunle Obayan. Obayhan said:
“Actually some of them
(projects) are brand new and they are coming up in 2016. We are going to
tenaciously pursue the employment generation activities of NDE, and we are
going to expand their scope.
This new schemes when they
come on board, are schemes such that they are going to take care of the social
security issues and something that will need majority of the people to get
something doing.
Besides, we have programmes
that are for the graduates of the tertiary institutions as well. We have so
many programmes that have been designed such that it will improve our service
delivery system.
We are going to pursue that
vigorously, we are going to start a national registration of the unemployed.
That we are going to take on fully so that we will have a great idea of how
many of them are around.
We have some but we are
going to improve on the information we have in our data base and we are going
to make sure that it is something we can access from our different locations,
even if you are down in the hinterland, you should be able to do so.
We have all these things planned in place, all these will
drive as soon as I settle down which is this week and you will start
seeing these activities around NDE.”
Regarding funding of such programmes, the acting DG stated
that
“The issue of funding is
something that is hindering the NDE to even do more in meeting its mandate. How
are you going to go about funding so that all visions won’t waste?
Being in government, so
many times, you have to be conscious about what goes on in your funds from here
to there. Right now, we are going into PPPs so that we can extend the mileage
of our funds and how many people we can reach and several collaborations as
well that we are getting into.
Some of them with the
members of the national assembly, world bank, we will want to partner with
DFID, ILO and so many development partners, but asides that, we try to do
more in 2016 because government does not have that kind of money right now, and
actually employment generation, and job creation should not be solely for
government; private sectors generally, they should come on board.
This is one of the
reasons we are planning a stakeholders’ forum, where the private sector
will actually know its role. It is not strictly for government, these people we
train, are not only for government, they are for all.” While presenting his
handover notes, Mohammed said he would leave behind an efficient workforce that
had been groomed in tackling the nation’s employment crisis.”
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