#5000 STIPEND- No record of unemployed youths-Minister

By Levinus Nwabughiogu
ABUJA—The Minister of State for Labour
and Employment, Mr. James Ocholi,
yesterday, said Nigeria lacks
comprehensive data of employed and
unemployed youths.
The minister spoke against the backdrop
of the campaign promise of All
Progressives Congress, APC, to pay
N5,000 stipend to indigent Nigerian
youth.
Ocholi spoke who had a chat with
journalists at the National secretariat of
APC in Abuja on Wednesday revealed the
plans of the Federal Government to also
provide jobs for unemployed graduates.

Ocholi



He however stated that the ministry has
engaged experts who are currently working
on the statistics of the unemployed.
“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.”
“As I 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 they are not enjoying
the job 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 preparatory for a mega scale on job
proffer.
“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, “So we have
decided to identify how many skill
acquisition centres we have in this nation,
then we know the capacities of each one.
“There are several of them, more than 76
of them but we have also discovered that
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.