 The crisis of unemployment. The average age of graduation from a Nigerian institution of higher learning is 26. A potential employee would get admission into university at 20. Maybe lose a year or two due to prolonged strikes, graduate at 25. Then there's almost a composite gap here between graduation and NYSC because of our inefficiencies in our systems. Now by the time the graduate is ready, you are competing for employment with previously employed workers who have lost their jobs due to economic downturn, recession or cost efficiency restructuring across organizations. Now jobs in certain institutions in the country have both an age and grid limitation that becomes an impediment to every new entrance. Now graduate training programs have become almost extinct, right? With employers now requiring experience that is just not possible for a fresh graduate. Recent statistics from statistic predicts that by the end of 2021, the unemployment rate in Nigeria is estimated to reach 32.5%. That's almost a third of the employable market. This figure is projected to increase further by the time we get to 2022 and data has shown that it has continued to rise year in, year out, right? This means that it is an employer's market and as it responds to the law of demand and supply. So basically, there are more people looking for employment that there are jobs. Now with an abundance of experienced workers losing their jobs and remaining unemployed or underemployed due to the devastating effects of recession and the economy, we have on our hands a national crisis with the potential to implode with both economic and social impact for our nation. This here, and I don't mind this devil's workshop, right? And employment can and will create the following ripple effect. Increase in crime rate. Underutilized capacity becomes available for civic unrest. I'm robbery. Financial crimes, aka Yahoo! Yahoo! Boys, as boys have to survive. Economic migration and a corresponding increase in mental health challenges due to resorting to mood enhancing drugs, leading to drug abuse, because a idle mind is truly the devil's workshop. Now in the last two years, despite the lockdown due to the global pandemic, Nigeria has become the thought-leading source of immigration to Canada's skilled worker program. Nigerians remain favourites for acceptance due to a high level of education and our lingua franca being English, making it easy to score the points required for entry. So basically, we are smart people. We know how to get the work done, which is why they're going to continue to take us. We are on the verge of a brain drain. So how do we change this? The time has come for us to begin to change the curriculum of our institutions to become more entrepreneurial with a focus on work readiness skills instead of theoretical context and frameworks that don't translate to real-life skills. It's time to introduce the concept of ideation and creativity to allow for broad-based thinking to come up with solutions for some of the Nigerians' biggest problems there by creating jobs. We must start to create alternative pathways to wealth and sustainability through funding of business incubators and accelerator programs to increase the survival rate of startups and support the entrepreneurial process. This government-funded but privately-run incubators can be created as private public partnerships, right, initiatives that would provide business advisory, co-working spaces and frameworks and network for entrepreneurs for easier parts to market. So basically, we want an entrepreneur to survive in this market. The Ministry of Labor will start to sanction organizations that have put discriminatory age limits for graduate roles to give everyone a fair playing field. So the Ministry of Interior and Labor should start to enforce the requirements of knowledge transfer from our expatriate community to ensure that the Nigerian workforce remains skilled and knowledgeable and employable to remain relevant for the future of work. Perhaps with this, we can start to drive the numbers down and truly provide an opportunity for full and productive employment and decent work for all in line with the Sustainable Development Goals 8. Wow. Which I must say, what I find most scary when you said 32.5 percent is if you put that across Nigeria's 200 million population, you're talking of approximately 65 million people unemployed. Yes. That's more than the population of Sierra Leone, Ghana and Togo put together. You see, and the thing about it is people want to work, right? People deserve to end a decent living. But when you've already put so many barriers, right, for them, how do they get on the job market? We're talking earlier about how, you know, the average age right now, to be honest, is actually around 28. And I remember the first time, you know, I became aware of that I was dealing with a youth population and many of them had just graduated or were still in university and I'll ask how old are you? And they'll say 26. What year are you? You're telling me you're in third year of university. So my brain's already calculating. You still have one year to go. You're still going to be at home for one year. Then you're going to graduate. How do you compete in the market, right? No one would employ you at that age because they'll say you're not young. You don't have youth on your side. People want you to work with your, one of the things that youth brings is energy. But if you're already 30, maybe you're married. You already have two children and then they want to employ you as a fresh graduate. Your priorities are different. You're thinking about your daughter, your son. You can't bring the best of you to the workplace. And then we then, there's, we don't have a conducive environment for entrepreneurship. Anyone who has tried to do any entrepreneurial venture in this country can tell you the drama that comes with it. You can't access funding, right? You can't pay the right people to work for you, right? And the cost of training are retraining because sometimes you're finding skills that are suboptimal. Now, you know, just even take piggyback on what you just said about the people in school. You made recommendation about reviewing what is the curriculum of today. I still think what we call education is a curriculum that was designed for the last century. I agree. A lot of what is being studied today can get you a job. Anywhere in the world. And if it's the individuals have to figure it out. Now, if you look at the other side, they said about 13.5 million Nigerian youths are out of education. So when you have people out of education, out of employment, you have the recipe for insecurity. I was actually very shocked when the president said, young Nigerians, if you want jobs, behave yourselves. And I really think that he's not actually seeing the cost and effect. The young people are agitated and you're seeing unrest because there is nothing to do. So you don't speak to the symptom when you haven't dealt with the cost, right? For you to say it's not my responsibility, they should behave themselves because we can get foreign direct investment. There are more things than just attracting foreign direct investment. Foreign direct investment will not fix your policy. In fact, a policy that has not, you haven't addressed or you're expecting me to bring my money to your company. A lot of foreign direct investors today cannot get their money out of the economy because of dollar scum. The biggest racket is the dollar racket. And quite frankly, a lot of people are cutting the middle here. So what I think is important because we're joking with this, it's very, very important. I went to the really, really far part of town yesterday, living like he's a bubble. You might not even know that you and I are living in this pseudo conducive environment. Going that far, you get to realize that we're only as safe as these people as engaged. And if we don't do what is needed to get them to jobs, we're losing the time. And there's cyclical employment, which means that as innovation is coming, more skills are going to become redundant. And if our curriculum is not going to upgrade people, we're preparing people for a world that has passed and they're graduating but they're dated or you're graduating outdated. So currently right now, you can actually say, is it really worth people going to university? Is it worth it considering what you're getting? It's not worth it at all. You're actually better off learning a vocational skill. You are actually better off learning a vocational skill. I run an animation company and half the people I work with, I haven't seen their degrees. In fact, if you have interest, passion, you're in. And it's not about whether you have a degree, our degrees will be prepared people for certification but not for not for industries. And if we don't solve entrepreneurial problems, it's going to really, really hit us hard. The average Nigerian is actually an entrepreneur by design. They hustle, but it's always about the quick work. The thinking of entrepreneurship should be about value creation, not just about making the margin. But how can you think about value creation if you can't eat? So it's easy to say, you know, they should be thinking a long term. But if you think on the small scale, you see these guys who want to work, they decide, okay, I'm going to set up my cart on the road to self-food. And they have their clients. I'm one of them. But one day, the local government come, they clear them up. What are they meant to do? They're actually making an honorable living. You're not supplying any support for them. They have decided, you know what? Rather than steal, rather than be a new sense, let me actually do something on which I can feed my family. And even that is taken away from them. So really, there's just so little hope. You shouldn't go to university. Okay, I want to do a vocational skill. I want to work. I want to become an entrepreneur. But again, the system is not designed for entrepreneurs. You might spend 10 years doing a four-year course. So that is that side of the waste of time. You know, for me, I think what's most the problem with the situation is even for entrepreneurship, we have double-digit interest rates. They're not conducive for entrepreneurship at all. If you look at the amount of money used to buy, okay, let's look at Nigeria's budget. We buy computers every year. Every parastartal, Nigeria has more than 1,500 ministries, departments, and agencies. And everybody buys computers every year. If that money was taken just as soft loans given to people to go into entrepreneurship, we'll actually be doing a lot better than our so-called computerized remote access to government agencies, which don't even exist in the beginning. I actually think even the civil service as it is, it's actually a place where most of what you find are duplications of roles, and many people sitting down there doing nothing. So that in itself is a place that cannot drive an economy. When have you tried to get a license, you see four weeks, it will take you two years, right? And then you spoke about access to credit and loans. Every time the government puts a face that there's access to credit and they collateralize it, they fail to understand what the country is. There are things called matching capital. In other countries, if you're an entrepreneur, you have 50%, they'll meet it. But to put a collateral in front of an entrepreneur that's trying to start, you should be giving them tax haven, telling them to have three years tax break. So you can actually scale, because the reality is that the future of job creation is in the hands of the entrepreneurs. The government cannot create jobs, they only create the climate for jobs. And creating that climate is actually creating this funding, access to funding, access to enabling environment, access to skill, right on a level, let education work and feed the economy. There's a disconnect between economy and education. And even the tech industry, see what the fintech space has done. We have unicorns now that have emerged in the last few years. But guess what the government is doing? They're not having to use regulations, stifle people bringing all those draconian regulatory laws. Regulation is not meant to kill businesses, it's meant to empower and make them thrive. If our regulation is about getting them out of the space, you're going to be reducing job. And I hope they understand that. I don't think they do. I think the business is to regulate and the business is to control and the business is to stifle. It's not to create. It's not great. Nothing with conversation or negotiation. They throw the laws at you without first understanding the premise upon which those laws are made. You know, but you know, there's something you said about the evaluate, they can look at the big picture in most developed and developing economies. Actually, most economies, including Nigeria, right? The SME represents more than 80% of the GDP, 70% of GDP and 80% of employment. So that means really you should be focusing on driving and growing small to medium, even micro, micro small to medium enterprise, because that company hiring 10 people here, 20 people here, 50 people here has a local effect across the entire economy. How many jobs really can be created out of that? Microfinance banks, ideally in Bangladesh, microfinance banks were very helpful in helping all those local farmers and SMEs assess certain kind of capital. In fact, they functioned like companies where they were doing their risk assessment was very detailed. Now we have a situation where our banks are only good for deposit collection. That's it. All they want is bring your money. Let's do that. So our banks are not specialized. So banks are actually all, it's all about, let's get, it's not about sitting down. Let's make some quick money. No, the products are not differentiated. Every product is similar. It's just about women account, children account. Bravo. Tony is up next after the break. Stay tuned.