Youth Unemployment in Nigeria.

YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT
Unemployment arises whenever the supply of labour exceeds the demand for it at the prevailing wage rate. Causes of unemployment can therefore be analyzed from both the supply and the demand sides of the labour market in Nigeria. On the supply side, there is the rapidly growing urban labour force arising from rural-urban migration. Rural-urban migration is usually explained in terms of push-pull factors. The push factors include the pressure resulting from man-land ratio in the rural areas, and the existence of serious underemployment arising from seasonal cycle of climate. The factors are further strengthened in Nigeria by lack of infrastructural facilities, which makes rural life unattractive.
The implications are both social, economic and political. It is argued in one paper that youth unemployment is potentially dangerous as it sends disturbing signal to all segments of the Nigerian
Society. The rate of youth unemployment in Nigeria is high, even at the period of economic normalcy i.e. the oil boom of the 1970s (6.2%); 1980s (9.8%) and the 1990s (11.5%). Youth unemployment therefore is not a recent phenomenon as is conveyed in the various tables in this paper. The theoretical standpoint of the paper is influenced by functionalist school of thought, with a bias for European school of modern ism which argues that youth play a central role in the overall survival of Nigeria. Ignoring the political, economic and social roles they play amounts to threatening the very survival of Nigeria as a nation. Thus to reduce unemployment, the paper suggests among others, the establishment of Work
Incentive Programme (WIN) by the Nigerian State.
Government in league with the private sector it is further suggested, can create job corps for school dropouts as one major remedy to unemployment.
The paper further sees hope for Nigeria only if Youths are mobilized by way of genuinely socializing them into taking their roles in the stratification system.
National Youth Employment and Vocational Skill
Development Programme was designed for youths in recognition of the fact that over 70 percent of the unemployed people in the country are youths who lack productive and marketable skill. This was aimed at providing unemployed youths with basic skills that are needed in the economy. This is achieved by attaching them as apprentices to companies, ministries, parastatal and professional craftsmen and women. Some of them are given admission into vocational training institutions to learn a trade.
Approved training organizations and individual craftsmen are paid a fee for imparting their skills to the beneficiaries of the scheme. Also this scheme was designed to provide unemployed youths with simple basic skills that would enable them covert discarded materials like snail shells, coral, coconut shells and other scrap materials into valuable object like decorative items, toys etc.