PRESS STATEMENT
The Youth Rights Campaign (YRC) hereby calls for increase in the
pay of N-Power volunteers as well as improvement in their working conditions.
This should start with increasing the monthly allowance of the volunteers from
the current N30, 000 and the regularization of their employment unlike the
temporary and volunteering nature of the scheme.
The Youth Rights Campaign (YRC) – a platform of the Education
Rights Campaign (ERC) that focuses on promoting and defending the rights of
young people to full employment, decent jobs and living wage – believes that
without improving the pay and working conditions of the N-Power volunteers, the
scheme stands the risk of ending up as a charade without contributing
meaningfully to addressing the problem of unemployment and deepening poverty,
both of which are conditions predominating among the vast youth population of
the country.
As it is currently packaged; the N-power scheme amounts to no more
than casual labour. It is like the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) extended
by an additional year. The workers fraudulently named volunteers are placed on
low pay without due cognizance of the National Minimum Wage law, condition of
service and right to belong to trade union. It is a temporary employment subject to
termination after two years. This is in gross violation of the extant
provisions of the labour law, conventions of the International Labour
Organisation (ILO) and other international instruments to which Nigeria is a
signatory which prohibits casualization and prescribes the regularization of
unemployment with clearly defined conditions of service.
We hereby call on the
Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), Trade Union Congress (TUC) and the United
Labour Congress (ULC) as well as youth organisations to take this matter up
with the federal government by organizing a national campaign involving mass
demonstrations to begin to demand the stoppage of casualisation of N-Power
volunteers and the regularization of their employment in accordance with the
provisions of the labour laws. The labour movement and youth organisations must
insist that what is needed to address the youth unemployment crisis is not
another variant of the National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) but real and decent
jobs that come with living wage, decent condition of service and rights to join
trade unions.
Quarterly reports from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS)
have placed unemployment figure in Nigeria around 28 million people, who are
mostly young people. The trend of unemployment in the country threatens every
aspect of social life, and is a ticking time bomb, given the youth demography, if
not combatted headlong. It is for this reason that the Youth Rights Campaign
(YRC) is worried and taken aback by the Buhari/Osinbajo government's N-Power
programme which to all intent and purposes amount to window-dressing the youth
unemployment crisis.
According to the National Bureau of
Statistics (NBS), with the Nigerian labour force population rising by a five
year average of over 2.6 million annually, the economy needs to generate the
same level of jobs annually just to hold the unemployment rate at its current
level. Against this background, the N-Power scheme whose objective is to get
into temporary jobs only 500, 000 volunteers in two years amounts, contrary to
the propaganda and media hype, to a ridiculously weak, futile and ineffective
approach to solving the unemployment crisis. Meanwhile the so-called private
sector that is relied upon to create jobs has proved incapable even in the
period of economic upswing to create adequate jobs for the teeming population
of the unemployed. It is therefore not difficult to imagine what would happen
in a period of economic crisis.
So as the NBS noted, the magnitude of
employment in the economy has not been sufficient or adequate to meet the
ever-growing labour market; hence the continuous rise in the level of
unemployment in the country. “Between Q1-Q3 2016, 3.7million people have
entered the labour force with net jobs of 422,135 created within that period,
giving a shortfall of 3.2million for Q1-Q3 2016. This has resulted in a rise in
the combined unemployment and underemployment levels from 29.2% (10.4% for
unemployment alone) at the beginning of 2016 to 33.6% (13.9% for unemployment
alone) by end of Q3 2016” (Job Creation
Survey, 2nd and 3rd Quarters 2016 Summary Findings and Selected Tables).
YRC holds that at the root of the unemployment crisis in Nigeria
is the inequitable neo-colonial capitalist system and successive Nigerian
governments’ slavish reliance on so-called private sector to develop the
economy. Expectedly, the Buhari/Osinbajo government has proved to be no
different. In an article by Punch newspaper of June 15, the Acting President,
Yemi Osinbajo was reported to have justified the negligible impact of N-power
on national unemployment figure by saying that "we can't do
everything". Here, as usual, the government is shifting the responsibility
for job creation on the private sector. However, the privatization of power
sector has shown that beyond scheming for more profit, the private sector
cannot be counted on to develop the economy or create needed jobs especially in
the face of massive infrastructural deficit. Instead, government needs to
invest in value-creating, labour-intensive industries, and approach job
creation as and a social responsibility of the government and a means of
creating new economic value for the country. This is exactly where the current
N-power scheme of the government, among other defects, is lacking in strategic
planning.
For example, the quest of the federal government to employ more
teachers should be motivated by the need to improve the knowledge base of the
country, and further develop public education as well as science or technology
which would have both short and long term impact on economic development. But with
public education underfunded and consequently most schools in derelict
conditions, sometimes without chalks or books, it is difficult to contemplate
any modicum of planning in the government's policy.
YRC believes that job creation should be the responsibility of
government. At the moment no segment of the national economy is working
optimally. So therefore there exists potential to absorb all the high skilled,
middle-skilled and unskilled labour in the country. Consequently, we demand an
urgent national job creation strategy to be developed by a committee including
elected representatives of trade unions and youth organizations that is capable
of boosting the economy, and providing living-wage paying jobs anchored on
standard labour practices. This would entail a nationwide programme for rapid
industrialization, expansion and modernization of the agricultural sector, expansion
of public education and health sectors as well as a massive public works programme
to rebuild failing infrastructures, build road and rail networks as well as
extensive water transportation facilities through public departments of works,
rather than enriching big business contractors who spend far less on casualized
workforce.
Wole Olubanji Daniel
Fidelis
Protem National
Coordinator Protem
National Secretary
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