Scary future for jobless youths

IN my church last Sunday, seasoned columnist and former editor of Daily Times, Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, raised concerns about the large population of unemployed youths in Nigeria.  He said in the next 34 years, our youth population alone is expected to rise up to 200 million – about 13 million short of our current total population.




With 186,987,563 people, we currently account for 2.5 per cent of the world’s population – the seventh highest.  So, if our youth population (aged 35 and below), now about 80 million, grows to 200 million, they would displace over 200 countries across the world on the population ranking table (http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/).
Are we planning for the implication of such explosion?  Mr Ogunsanwo, who was at the Latter Rain Assembly on the invitation of the serving overseer, Pastor Tunde Bakare, expressed worry that a nation of 200 million youths, many without decent means of livelihood, would be a menace to the whole world.  He said they would mostly likely be fathered by many of today’s area boys – miscreants who unleash terror in communities.
He has reasons to be concerned.  In the Unemployment/ Under-Employment Watch for first Quarter of 2015 the National Bureau of Statistics stated: “44.3 per cent of Nigerians in the labour force aged 15-24 were either unemployed or underemployed, while another 25.9 per cent aged 25-34 were either unemployed or unemployed in Q1 2015”.
I also share Ogunsanwo’s concerns.  On my way to work every day, I see large numbers of idle young people who hang around senior miscreants, waiting for crumbs from their low tables of cheap booze and drugs.  I worry about their lack of gainful engagement.  Dr Obiageli Ezekwesili said last month at the launch of the Bunmi Adedayo Foundation, where she was keynote speaker, that everyone who regards himself as educated, privileged or affluent should be concerned about the fate of their less privileged neighbours.  Limited education connives with poverty to limit their opportunities.  As a result, they find it difficult to better their lives.  If their lives are not good, ours cannot be peaceful.
We need to expand opportunities to our youths.  They should gain easy access to funding for education; capital for enterprise; mentoring for guidance so that in 35 years they and their seeds will not be a menace but a blessing to Nigeria and the world