When we were boys and girls, our fathers said; go on and read, get your way into the university, find a good job and live a good life. Sounds magical and rather straightforward right? , Of course it does and most of us have gone out of our way to precisely implement our parent’s wordings, following their advice religiously as if it were a blueprint guiding us to heaven. But then, as young people growing up, who wouldn’t associate their mother’s advice to a favorite verse in the good book of life?!
And indeed, we sacrificed an entire childhood of playing out in the field, cartoons, and my favorite ‘cha baba na cha mama’ and in their place chose to wake up early every day for school, sitting on a desk for more than its healthy, having only few minutes break for play, all these in order to get a place in the university or an equivalent institution of higher learning. After getting our way into campus we realized life was perfect, everything was falling into plan and the future seemed from a distance to follow this well-crafted ingenious pattern. For most of us, that was the end of working hard, the end of waking up early, end of sitting on a desk for more than concentration requires of us and end of education actually. I mean, how hard can it be, reading your way into the university to justify treating each day as if it were the New year's eve? (lol, I’m just kidding. It is in fact difficult and unnecessarily strenuous). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not by any chance justifying the ‘hooray’ treatment of campus life.
After getting your fancy degree in engineering or your Bachelor of Arts (in God knows what) the lifelong joy of a predetermined, prophesized happy future comes to an abrupt halt. You realize the blueprint of ‘read-go to campus-then good job’ can no longer fulfill itself. You begin doubting its truth in the first place, you became discouraged, depressed and inconsolable as you trek up and down offices looking for a job, or more precisely, a place where you will idle for a whole month waiting a pay check to sustain your life and that of your many dependents.
This is a story whose truth can be found in the experiences of countless disgruntled youths throughout the country today. Many young people wake up to a boring Monday morning of sitting by the roadside or of seeing older members in the neighborhoods hurrying up to report to their various working places while they stay back wasting all they learned in school doing practically nothing. Equally disappointing, many of the few youths who have jobs are really in disguised unemployment as they perform unproductive errands incapable of adding value to society and to themselves, tasks which are very far from the courses they pursued in campus.
Truth about the giant monster of unemployment seems to speak for itself with global statistics ranking Kenya and Africa at large with colossal numbers of unemployed population. So, what’s the cause or root cause for this unfortunate observation in Africa?
I may not have the empirical authority to speak on behalf of other African states on this matter, but I can point with undaunted precision at the root cause of unemployment in Kenya, facts which can be extrapolated to other African countries. When you think of Kenya and unemployment in the same sentence such as this one, corruption and its two favorite cousins, tribalism and nepotism will immediately come to mind. And it is naked reality in Nairobi and any other struggling Kenyan city that thousands of qualified job seekers have been accepted or rejected at interview rooms based on their ethnicity, blood relation or how much ‘cozy’ they were with the employer. Our enormously corrupt police force and military have been at the forefront perpetuating massive corruption through ensuring virtually all recruits pay a bribe before being selected to serve their country at the war front. Tactics used by the Teachers service commission (TSC) to employ new graduates as teachers have constantly been questioned as they too are riddled with nepotism and corruption.
In context of this discourse, the correct question to ask about corruption is: What if we end corruption, nepotism and tribalism (ideally) will there be increased employment? Will the rate of unemployment vigorously decline? Will more youths be absorbed into the job market? Think about it for a moment.
If you truly gave it some thought, then the answer should be an absolute no. Unemployment is simply not going to vanish overnight just because Kenyans have miraculously decided to be the saints they are not. One thing is for sure though, our collective decision to mitigate corruption may propagate the scarce concept of fairness and equality. Is it not in any case a biblical concept? – One must reap what they sow. that’s justice, God’s own justice. This will ensure that persons with skills and required qualifications get the jobs they deserve before those of comparatively low skills and qualifications. However, much as this concept sounds sweet and true to the Holy Scriptures and is in good books with my ideal notion of social order it will unfortunately do nothing to get the thousands of job seekers into employment. It will simply get the right people into employment in a competitive world of survival for the fittest while still leaving more and more youths unemployed.
The real reason behind unemployment in Kenya is the low level productivity. This applies across Africa. We seem to be getting one side of the structure right but building the other side entirely wrong thereby sentencing the overall social structure to an eventual collapse. Every year thousands of graduates pour out of our many institutions of higher learning expecting to find a job, add value and leave a mark in the common objective of nation building. This is truly a good thing as high levels of literacy are ideally supposed to proportionately improve the quality of life for citizens. However, year after year we fail to ask ourselves the question of where these graduates are going to find jobs.
Job creation for our graduates is at a terribly low level, thus we are constantly finding ourselves in a position where we are producing so many accountants with nothing to account for, so many engineers with nothing to engineer, so many teachers with ironically nobody to teach. The job market as today is already overwhelmingly saturated and with the current job spaces available it would take several generations of humanity to truly employ all the graduates. If only we were creating commodities, new services, new innovations and inventions, reducing our overreliance on imports and begin a framework to introduce manufacturing of products across all areas of the market, then our accountants would have brand new companies to render their services to. Graduates from all fields would immediately be absorbed into these new ventures that not only give them a place to make a livelihood but also ensure enough money remains in circulation in our economy. Instead of exporting currency for toothpicks and spoons from China, we would actually be exporting surplus products for currency much needed to pay our people highly and consequently improving their quality of life.
Productivity which is basically everyday individuals coming up with ‘things’ that add value to country and turning them into companies or business with a capability of employing our graduates is the only antidote to this strand of malaria called unemployment. With this, corruption would have to die a slow natural but painful death since individuals would no longer have to pay bribes for the few job spaces in the economy. But the situation today at the job market promotes corruption, nepotism and tribalism.
Our common efforts at the unemployment warfront must not be diluted with talks of spending billions to fight non-existing corruption. These billions should instead be channeled towards extensive research programs at our universities and other reputable research institutions and also in promoting value-adding entrepreneurship among our young people. Our universities are still intensive cramming centers which frankly add little weaponry in the fight against unemployment and in promoting the idea of value-adding entrepreneurship. Very little money goes into research geared towards creating consumer products and services which are the pillar in developing any economy from its doldrums to self-sufficiency. Our research institutions are strangely still tied up in the development of already developed agricultural and biomedical solutions which is really an excuse to write huge budgets to the government ministry in the name of funding serious scientific experiments.
Value-adding entrepreneurship is the key to job creation and striking the balance between job seekers and job creators. Otherwise, failure to find a balance between the two symbiotic creatures by over promoting job seeking over job creation will result to an eventual crisis which will in no doubt keep Kenya in the league of failed, poor states forever.
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