It is true that more than 80 per cents of job vacancies in Nigeria are not advertised. The consequence is that most job seekers do not have access to information on available job vacancies, thereby making it difficult for them to apply for such jobs.
Last December, the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) said in compliance with the third mandate of the Directorate which requires it “to obtain and maintain a data bank on employment and vacancies in the country with a view to acting as a clearing house to link job seekers with vacancies in collaboration with other government agencies,” it is set to commence online registration of unemployed persons in the country.
However, speaking last Wednesday at the All Progressives Congress (APC) national headquarters in Abuja, Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Mr. James Ocholi (SAN) said there was still no reliable statistics on unemployed youths in the country.
Experts say the unavailability of such data makes it difficult for both employers and employees to have reliable access to labour market information.
In the United Kingdom (UK) for instance, a new government website named Universal Jobmatch was recently launched. On the portal, jobseekers can search for employment and employers can upload and manage their own vacancies whilst searching for prospective employees.
The UK government also has Jobcentre Plus an executive agency of the Department for Work and Pensions. The agency provides services primarily to those attempting to find employment and to those requiring the issuing of a financial provision due to, in the first case, lack of employment, of an allowance to assist with the living costs and expenditure intrinsic to the effort to achieve employment, or in all other cases the provision of social-security benefit as the result of a person without an income from employment due to illness-incapacity including drug addiction. The organisation acts from within the government’s agenda for community and social welfare. Job vacancies advertised for employers within each of the public offices use a computer system called the Labour Market System (LMS).
A visit to the job portal on the NDE website as at Saturday, 23 January, 2016 showed the following message, “WE ARE UNDER CONSTRUCTION. We are currently doing some enhancement to our site. Stay tuned!”The directorate however runs a vibrant website where those seeking to be trained for various vocational skills can register online.
But there is a need for government to empower the agency to achieve its mandate of obtaining and maintaining a data bank on employment and vacancies in the country.
According to Davide Yusuf, the CEO of Career Intelligence, Nigeria urgently needs to create a job centre run by the government as is done in other developed countries.
He said, “there is no structural platform in Nigeria. Nigeria needs job centres. We don’t have job centres in Nigeria; job centres run by the government and not by the private sector. The private sector will always do things in a way that they can make profit but the government needs to attend to this. The government needs a dedicated job centre. The job centre is not about buildings, it is about system, it is about technology. For instance, if you have a credible job centre, it means somebody in Enugu State can see the vacancy in Abuja because the job centre technology will provide the poll factor for the private sector to advertise their jobs on that site. So the technology on this site will also help the job seeker to gain access to this jobs. When you do that, the following will happen, the technology will assist the job seeker to know what jobs exist and also remove the barrier of lack of access to information.”
While on a courtesy visit to the minister of labour and employment earlier in the year, Edo State governor, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, lamented the absence of job centres in the country.
In his words, “this ministry in the past years was noted for registration and placement of unemployed Nigerians in various job centres across the country thereby generating reliable data of unemployed youths as well as carry out regular trade test, do proper grading of skilled and semi-skilled and produce competent man-power through vocational training without necessarily attending higher institution.
“I believe sir that this is one area that we have neglected over the years and giving the commitment of the present administration to job creation we need to re-establish those units in all the state of the federation possibly in every local government area for people who are qualified and willing to work to register.”
But defending the government’s position, Ocholi said the new administration was already partnering with private companies to create a reliable data on unemployed persons.
“Before we got to where we are, there was no data anywhere. There is no data of the unemployed. In fact, there is no data of the employed. It is a bad situation,” the minister lamented.
He however disclosed that the ministry had started the process of gathering data of unemployed and employed Nigerians.
“As l talk with you, there are experts working on the software on the various things which we have discussed with them on how to capture the details of the unemployed and the employed. And for those who are employed, there are many who are in wrong places; there are many who are in jobs and are not enjoying the jobs and who want to have a job better than what they are doing.
“There is a firm that we have sourced for, working with the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) right now. NDE has done a pilot scheme in Bwari and they have an office in Lobito crescent right now working in preparation for a mega scale on job proffering,” the minister added.
Asked when the data would be ready for the ministry to commence its mandate, Ocholi said, “What it takes to get that data ready is part of our work. Our work does not begin when the data comes out because the data itself does not employ people.”
On what the ministry is doing on the skill acquisition centres, he said, “we have decided to identify how many skills acquisition centres we have in this nation, then we know the capacity of each one. There are several of them, more than 76 of them but we have also discovered that the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs has a lot of skill centres in the Niger Delta region which were built by the ministry but they do not have capable hands with resources, with skills to be able to train. Ministry of Agric has several and even the Ministry of Finance.
“So we have decided to do a memo to the SGF for Mr. President to galvanise all such centres and bring them to one fold. Then we can do a planning on how many each centre can take for the next three months. We will look at the nature of the skills that can be acquired within the period of time, what do we do to sustain those people that will acquire the skills and while acquiring those skills, what stipends can be paid to them to keep them in the training so that while being trained you earn something. That will bridge the gap between now and when they open their shop and begin to employ labour”.
Leadership.
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