To give Nigerians insight to its many strategic effort towards winning the war against the menace of unemployment in the country, the Director-General of the National Directorate of Employment (NDE), Mallam Abubakar Nuhu Fikpo, in a brief interview with selected journalists revealed that NDE has gone beyond skill acquisition and training to providing transient jobs to Nigeria graduates, purposefully to expose and equip them with working experiences in the area of their field of study. He also stated that many of the graduates have been retained by many organisations due to how relevance they made themselves. CHRISTIAN APPOLOS brings details. Excerpts.
There have been news making the rounds that NDE has created jobs here and there, and people keep asking; where are the jobs NDE said they have created. For clarity, kindly highlight some of the job creation programmes of NDE that are directly beneficial to graduates in the country?
On what we doing for graduates. Currently, we have two strategic and effective job creation skills that has to do with graduate. The first one is called Graduate Attachment Programme. In this programme, we recruit graduates from diploma and above and we post them to different government owned and private sector businesses in the areas that area relevant to their field of study. The reasons why we do this is; one: for them to acquire the basic and necessary experience that employers require.
Number two, we target to expose them to work environments. So that by the time we are handing off, they have acquired enough experience to work anywhere. This also help to enrich their curriculum vitae. So we provide a transient and not a permanent job and the intent is basically to expose them to working environment which we are are sure will help them acquire the needed experience.
Thirdly, our reason for doing this is; if they made themselves irrelevant by being efficient and effective, that organisation will not let them go. And for your information at the moment, we are writing and commending organisations who have retained graduates like that. There are many organizations who have retained many of them, surprisingly.
We send the graduates for the duration of three months, sometimes for six months. By the time the period lapses, many of the organisations does not want to let them go. They absorb many of them.
The second strategic job creation one that has to do with graduate is called the Graduate Coaching Scheme. In this one, we are using a stone to kill two birds. One we are engaging the graduates, two we are targeting school leavers who are deficit in their O levels and cannot gain admission into any tertiary institution. What we do is; we get this graduates together and ask them to coach these people. So that they can make up for their deficiencies and then gain admission and move forward. So these are some of the things we have that has to do with graduates and graduates alone.
In reality, are your job creation programmes really helping to left the millions of unemployed Nigerians and household from poverty?
The negative effect of unemployment touches virtually every household in our country. Every household feels the impact of employment in this country. And we believe that with the support we have been receiving from government to impact upon the lives of unemployed Nigerians as well as those living in serious poverty, we are really making a difference.
Our target is, if these unemployed Niger can’t come to us, we should be able to go to them. We should be able to educate them at their doorsteps about the opportunities that there are available.
We believe they can take advantage of our skills acquisition programmes to either be self-employed or even provide jobs for others. Although we have structures in all States of the Federation, we try to reach out by establishing our presence in all the local government areas. Thus why we believe that the media is one effective partner for which we can collaborate in order to enlighten the people out there, in order to educate and spread the activities the NDE has been doing.
As at today, we are implementing what we have been planning. We have spoken about our job creation programmes anc]d the people who have actually acquired skills and those that are actually undergoing training, are really doing it and they are committed to doing it, and that is what we have been trying to showcase.
Our target is to ensure that by the time they graduate, people should have confidence in them. Tye government cannot do it all for them. The government provides the necessary requisite opportunities by making training facilities available to them. And to some extent, the government too provides you know, capital for them, supports them with capital to establish their businesses.
But the truth is government cannot do it all. So many Nigerians are actually learning, some of them have already learned, some of them have graduated. In fact people, families, and relations, friends and organisations are already having confidence in graduates of the NDE training programmes. So we enjoin Nigerians to invest in them by supporting them with loans, by supporting them with grants, by supporting them with the needed capital for their business take off or business expansion. This is the essence of why we are working with the media in order to achieve this results.
How willing us the Federal government to make available more funds and as well collaborate with private sector businesses to provide funding for the beneficiaries of NDE skills trained graduates?
On funding for them to either start or expand their businesses, the effects of economic meltdown still leave with us in Nigeria and globally. But that does not stop us from planning and proposing. We have been planning, proposing, sourcing and linking participants to financial establishments, to financial organisations, for them to be able to access funding.
We do not believe that we can provide them with all the necessary capital, which is why we provide a linkage for them. We link them up with CBN, we link them up with other organisations so that they can access funding. Now, aside from that, we have just had our collaboration with the World Bank. We call that projects YESSO. Through the project after training, the World Bank supported the beneficiaries each one of them with a maximum of N250,000.
So we have our window of collaboration. Aside from the fact that the NDE also provides little funding. We have a window of collaboration with other government agencies, private institutions, or even philanthropist, good Nigerians who are willing to support the people around them.
We have the proposal to ask the government to please raise or review NDE budgetary provisions for us to be able to accommodate, train and empower more unemployed Nigerians. But don’t forget, one of the things the NDE believes in is not really to give this people the finances. No. We want to change the mentality of unemployed Nigerians. Yes, is not to get the certificates, but it›s also good to have skills. So we want the attitude of Nigerians, the attitude of unemployed Nigerians to change because we kept saying that certificates will not pay your bills.
You are required to pay little bills and your certificate can not do that, but your hands are toll really made tools, ready-made tools for you. The moment you acquire skills, you can go to fend for yourself, you can have something doing. So the spirit is for people to believe that the ready-made job, the white collar job is no more. The days of the ready-made white color jobs is no more. And whether we like it or not, government is the only major employer of labour. And we know that the finances of government cannot cater for all and don›t forget that the unemployment thing cuts across all categories of classes; people who are graduates, people who are not graduate, people who are school leavers, school dropouts, those within the vulnerable group. You can imagine our man see that is.
So the truth is, government can›t cater for all but it does what it can with the resources available, and then paves the way for others to also imitate and lend their support. The private sector, the philanthropists and committed unpatriotic Nigerians who are willing to support unemployed Nigerians.
We have others who have approached us because of the passion they have for lifting people who are living in abject poverty. This patriotic Nigerians are willing to providing employment to unemployed Nigerians.
The Skill acquisition facilities, how effective are they in terms the tools required to train beneficiaries?
We are deliberately conscious to upgrading existing skill acquisition centres for effective utilisation in view to winning the war against unemployment. In fact, we are hoping that our budgetary allocation will be made sufficient to enable us do the much we are expected to do.
As part of our efforts; we are in talks with the Embassy of Belarus, and we were proposing visiting the Warri Model Skill Centre for them to also support us by upgrading some of the facilities we have. So, that discussion is still in progress. So, we have that in mind.
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