Over 2m Nigerians Unemployed - NDE Boss
Bayelsa
From John Iwori in Yenaoga
No fewer than 2 million Nigerians are unemployed nationwide. The figures arose from a documentation exercise undertaken by the National Directorate of Employ-ment (NDE) in all the states.
Director General of the NDE, Dr. Samuel O. Adelodun, who disclosed this in Yenagoa, in a chat with THISDAY said the directorate got the figure from a five-days-documentation exercise carried out in all the 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja.
"When I came on board as the Director General of NDE, I needed data to work with. This is because I strongly believed that without adequate data, there can be no proper planning. And without planning, we cannot achieve the desired results."
That was why we embarked on a documentation exercise to ascertain the total number of persons that are unemployed in the country. And what we got was amazing. For only 5 days the exercise lasted in our offices nationwide, we registered 2 million unemployed persons. "That means, if we continue the exercise for a month or two, we would have registered more. It is a very grim situation. But we have to face the challenge squarely by tackling the menace of joblessness in the nation," he said.
The Director General who was in the Bayelsa State capital for a one day meeting of master trainers and the management of NDE stated that the directorate has mapped out strategies to address the problems of unemployment in the country.
According to Adelodun who was the special guest of honour at the occasion, the strategies of the directorate are already yielding results as not less than 2000 persons will be employed in each state and Abuja through its various programmes.
He explained that the idea behind the various programmes of NDE is to empower the people with the requisite skills to enable them set up their own business or get paid employment.
On the reason for the master trainers meeting in Yenagoa, Adelodun said: "This meeting constitutes part of a series of activities laid out by NDE aimed at achieving the goals of the reform programme, especially in the employment creation sub-sector. It is my expectation that this gathering will add tremendous value to the NDE programme delivery strategies and achievements within the skills development components of the job creation activities of the directorate."
The state coordinator of NDE, Pastor Steve S. Musa said the meeting is geared at strengthening training outlets to deal with unemployment and its attendant problems.
According to Musa, "we want to equip unemployed youths with productive and marketable skills that could make them self employed, self-reliant and job creators instead of roaming around for non existent jobs."
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