Nigeria is a hustler’s economy – This cannot make us great

Further to the statistics on unemployment recently issued by the National Bureau for Statistics, the long and short is that we are all hustlers in Nigeria. The NBS concluded that “22.3% of the working-age population were out of the labour force in Q4 2022, while it was 20.1% in Q1, 2023”. This may mean that this category is not looking for employment. Why? Could they all be infirm? Or for some reason zoned out and unwilling to work? I think this is where the real work is. We should have a much smaller percentage of young or working-age people who are unwilling to work in a country with so many problems and pining for labour.

Again, providing for the shortcomings of a small sample size, this survey by the NBS tells a story.

1. The face of work has changed the world over. Young people these days no longer think of work as some 8 am to 4 pm or 9 am to 5 pm place to go. And oftentimes, the old format is inefficient.
2. Perhaps many young Nigerians are simply no longer interested in work. Why? They are now exposed to the ‘developed’ world and all the glitz via the internet and the plethora of social media handles. Leaders too have not done much work in psychoanalysing the youths of today in designing policies. Nigerian youths can no longer be bothered to do the heavy lifting of building a nation from scratch. Many have stopped trying and are just waiting to ‘japa’ through any means. Many are also deluded about what it takes to become successful in life and many think ‘abroad’ is a place of enjoyment. Many would also rather be pranksters, bloggers or Big Brother ‘soft porn’ stars – anything for a big haul of money. Even the children of the rich, sponsored to very expensive schools; home and abroad, would rather be musicians or deejays (who work at night or never have to work at all since their work is also their play).
3. A recent report in the Punch newspaper https://punchng.com/how-fading-apprenticeship-technical-skills-worsen-poverty-job-loss-to-foreigners/ detailed how there is a drastic drop in apprenticeships and skills learning in Nigeria. This is a scary prospect because the skills we are talking about play a very critical role in society – carpenters, mechanics, tailors, welders, technicians, electricians, plumbers, etc. Most of the workers (bosses) interviewed say they no longer have young people coming in as apprentices. Most say that less than 2% of those who come bother to learn the work before leaving. For most boys from poorer homes in the south of Nigeria, the allure of yahoo-yahoo is way too strong. For the rich or middle-class ones, learning such skills does not even come up as everyone desires a degree. Even the world-famous Igbo apprenticeship system is waning out. Fewer and fewer boys remain in the villages to be picked up by ‘big men’ for training.  Most are already hardened and searching for big bucks in their teenage years.  And for those who bother to sound savvy in and out of government, the focus is on technology.  Can we focus on technology and abandon these core skills?  Who will repair our cars and plumbing in the future?  Are we deluding ourselves that we can leap over into the tech future without taking care of these ‘dirty jobs’?  The future is bleak in this regard. We are rudderless and rootless.
4. Roughly 85% of the Nigerian economy is informal – full of hustlers. Yet Nigeria is pushing more of its youths into ‘entrepreneurship’. Our understanding of ‘entrepreneurship’ here is shallow and used as an excuse for successive governments to shirk their responsibility of organising society, and creating adequate public sector jobs to ensure proper manning of public amenities. We cite the example of small-scale industries in China being the fulcrum of their economy but deliberately ignore that small-scale industries in China, Germany, the USA, and elsewhere are capacitated to produce tangible things and engage in massive exports. Most of our biggest businessmen/entrepreneurs (who are mere agents of the industries in these countries), only go as far as dealing with small-scale players out there. We should not deceive ourselves.
5. If the NBS intends to use this one-hour-per-week benchmark, it should remember that we are comparing apples with oranges at some level. A majority of Nigeria’s workforce is stuck at subsistence level – as maibolas, chewing gum sellers inside traffic and so on, until they get tired and become a liability to the country. Whereas the NBS report has presented the data from a global angle, the same data needs to be discombobulated to allow for Nigerian nuances. A youth working in MacDonalds in the US for example has many opportunities to grow even in the same sector and to live a fulfilled life. I am speaking here about the fundamental and foundational damage to our social system which renders most of our youths illiterate, unemployable, despondent and unable to scale their usefulness to society beyond that petty hustle they do. So, as I advised the SG in that parley, perhaps we don’t want to use 1-hour as a benchmark. Perhaps we want to make that like 10 hours a week (2 hours a day), in determining who is fully employed. Or we want to evolve more granular data that separates top earners as fully employed, but those earning meagre amounts with no prospects for bettering themselves, as unemployed. It is indeed unfair to consider everyone working for one hour as fully employed. Also, we need to look into the kind of survey questions that make such a large number of people say they don’t need more work!

I expect a lot more acerbic reactions in the next few days…. But at least this strikes up a good debate that allows us to dissect our many problems with our population, productivity, youth engagement, job creation, government responsibility, private sector contributions, artificial intelligence, technology in general, our several experiments with petty entrepreneurship, and what the future holds for our dear nation. These are crucial times indeed.