[1] Nigeria currently has about 21.7m unemployed people, 10.5m out-of-school children, about 3m internal refugees and 90m people living below the UN acknowledged poverty of surviving on less than $2 a day. A public works programme will be introduced to address all these maladies
[2] With nothing for our youths to do, no prospects of employment, limited training facilities and a shrinking economy, it is no surprise that banditry, terrorism, kidnapping, armed robbery and religious fundamentalism are on the rise. To make matters worse, AK47 assault rifles are freely available as the arms from the Libyan armories that were looted when Gadaffi fell, have found their way to Nigeria
[3] Now, it is not realistic for us to expect 20m jobs to be created by the private sector within a year. That only happens when you are getting say 15% annual economic growth. Nobody is investing substantially in Nigeria at the moment, so the federal and state governments simply need to force the pace of development
[4] South Africa has a very successful scheme to address this problem called the Expanded Public Works Programme. It currently employs 900,000 youths nationwide, getting them involved in projects like road construction, home building, railway line maintenance, refurbishing government buildings like schools, hospitals, clinics, airports, sea ports, etc
[5] In the run-up to hosting the 2014 World Cup, Brazil also used its public works programme to get the country ready. Youths involved in the programme refurbished all their major cities and cleaned up inner city areas ahead of the tournament
[6] If we want to be honest, the most successful public works programme ever was run by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. It got rid of German unemployment overnight and built those massive autobahns in the country. Many of them are still standing today. However, I will not advocate using the methods of the Nazis as the human cost of their measures was to high. Conditions in their camps were sub-human and atrocious
[7] Nigeria, however, can come up with a South African and Brazilian style programme. Indeed, our vice president Professor Yemi Osinbajo did recommend it in his report on reviving the Nigerian economy post-coronavirus
[8] For a public works programme to succeed, we will need each of our 36 states to agree to take on at least 500,000 people under the project. If the federal government then takes on an additional 1m youths, we will be home and dry
[9] Given the rate at which Nigeria is becoming the international kidnapping capital of the world, I am sure the global community will throw its weight behind a public works plan to address the growing pandemic. Even if they do not care about us, they do not want another Afghanistan on their hands, so I can see international development agencies funding a Nigerian works programme
[10] I will be asking the Nigerian Society of Engineers to put together a dossier detailing exactly what projects these youths will be working on, the duration of the programme and of course an estimation of costs.
