To solve the increasing unemployment in the country, governments have been urged to create an enabling environment for organised private sector and Small and Medium Enterprises to thrive, the engine of any economy globally.
This submission was made by the Assistant Pastor of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, RCCG, Region 1, Pst Samuel Olaniyan in Lagos recently while fielding questions from a group of newsmen on call made by the Industrial Training Fund (ITF) that private sector should come to government aid to scale down unemployment in the country.
Olaniyan said, “Jobs should be created by the private sector with government creating the enabling environment; providing the infrastructures, putting the right policies in place: fiscal and monetary policies, ensuring that inflation is kept at normal level, doing things that will galvanise activities in agriculture, mining, industry and virtually in all sectors.
That is the business of government, to fashion laws that will help people. But after creating jobs for people, it’s the job of the private sector.”
He stated further, “Any country where you have the large population of the workforce working for government, would always have the problem we are having in Nigeria, the problem of over-dependence on government, the problem of corruption, everybody is just struggling with what government can do. It should be the other way round.
There is a kind of distortion in our system that needs to be corrected, that is why people have been talking that God should give us the right focus, the right government that can do what is right. Industrial Training Fund is right so that the private sector can come to their rescue.”
He lamented the huge unemployment rate in the country, saying that the social ills bedevelling the country particularly youth restiveness is traceable to idleness.
“No doubt, unemployment rate is huge and there is a limit to what government can do. As we speak now, if you go to government office, they have more people than they need. The reason why we have youth restiveness is because they don’t have job to do. The private sector will create the jobs.
“But the government that is calling for help ought to enable the private sector. As we speak now, go to all virtually all sectors, you would find industries closing down particularly the small, medium enterprises. That is where we have a lot of problems and that is the engine of industrialisation. So, when you have to buy diesel, petrol at what cost? You know what it is. Cost of transportation, bad roads and several things. By the time you look at the cost of production, you can’t make sufficient money. Such business will run at loss,” he posited.
According to him, the private sector is not yet empowered to provide jobs because they are closing down.
“That is what government needs to address. How do we bring down the cost of energy? What do we do to our refineries? People are now advocating for modular refineries so that we will no longer be importing, we will be refining and producing ourselves. That will help to some extent. These are issues.
We are also talking about people stealing the crude, a lot of problems. But the Bible tells us that when the righteous rule, the people rejoice, that is where the church is coming from.
“Government is calling on private sector to help in the area of reducing unemployment, but they have more of the work to do. There is no much a Dangote can do if the government fails to create an enabling environment. There’s no how somebody will set up a business of between N50m to N100m and the environment still remains like this, that money will disappear. That is the problem.We are depleting national resources because of neglect of what government ought to do. I think sincerely, government needs to be sincere that they are not really doing enough, they are not doing the right things and they should focus on that.
“The big issue for any manufacturer now is what is the unit cost of production? How much am I spending and how much would come back to me? If we cannot deal with that today to the advantage of the investor, then you are not giving the right environment,” he stated.
