'I
once said that I was not elected president of Nigeria to spread
poverty; I was elected to generate and spread wealth,' Former President
Goodluck Jonathan pours out his achievements in an opinion editorial.
The issue of youth entrepreneurship in Africa is very critical, as
Africa is the only continent in which we will witness a population boom
in our lifetime.
Studies reveal the symbiotic relationship between youth
unemployment and youth restiveness. Accordingly, most violent crises in
Africa have been traced to a lack of education among its teeming youth
population.
Genuine search for development and sustainable peace must therefore
begin with youth empowerment and entrepreneurship. When I was governor
of Bayelsa State and later the President of Nigeria, I asked myself some
critical questions:
• Why are some nations rich and some poor?
• Why do individuals who grow up in similar circumstances end up differently, with some as successes and others as failures?
• Is the wealth of nations a result of geography, weather, culture, destiny, etc?
• What could a leader do to effectively lift a people out of the depths of poverty, and enable them to achieve prosperity?
After much soul searching, my conviction with regard to these
questions is this: wealth is a creation of the human mind properly
prepared by education. It is my firm belief that any nation that does
not spend its wealth and resources to developing the capacity of its
youth will eventually be forced to devote its resources to fighting
insecurity amongst those same youth.
As a leader, you can decide through your policies to educate the
youth, or face the consequences of failing to do so. The problem all
African leaders have is how to manage the youth bulge. Do we consider
this a ticking time bomb or an opportunity?
For me, there are two key areas we must invest our resources in if
we are to convert this perceived time bomb to the opportunity I believe
it is. The first is in requisite education and capacity building. This
should be followed by enabling youth entrepreneurship. Allow me to share
with you a brief account of the implementation of my vision to empower
the youth.
Within a year of my stewardship as the governor of Bayelsa State, I
made education a top priority. I provided infrastructure in primary,
secondary and tertiary institutions and gave undergraduate students
financial assistance in the form of bursary awards. I started building
two special post primary schools for gifted and talented children. The
relevance of the gifted children’s school was obvious. For the talented
children, the idea was to develop their natural talents in addition to
offering them sound education, so that at graduation they can make a
living from their God-given talents, if they choose to do so.
While construction work was on-going on the special schools, we
initiated a programme to encourage the best brains of the State. We
selected, through competitive entrance examinations, the most brilliant
pupils in our primary schools and sent them to the best secondary
schools in the country.
The idea was for the State Government to take care of the best
brains from the post-primary through the tertiary levels of their
educational careers and ensure that they attend the best institutions
anywhere in the world. It was designed for a minimum of 100 pupils to be
selected for this programme annually. I left the State after one year
and five months to contest election as the vice president, and therefore
could not see the idea through.
Upon assumption of office as president of Nigeria, I launched a
similar programme called the Presidential Special Scholarship Scheme for
Innovation and Development (PRESSID.) This scheme nurtured a select
cadre of professionals, to serve as facilitators for accelerated,
sustainable, economic and technological advancement.
Each year, through competitive examinations, we selected between
100 to 120 first class graduates and sent them to the top universities
in the world to study for higher degrees. These students were drawn from
various STEM disciplines. Let me mention here that Oxford University
was an integral part of this programme and indeed, a favourite for most
of our applicants.
The essence of the programme was to get a crop of youth, over a period of time, who will advance our course technologically.
When I launched the programme, I mentioned that we were training
young people who would take Nigeria to the moon. In addition to this, my
administration also gave a series of educational incentives to
university students across the country. We established twelve
conventional Universities and a specialised Maritime University. To
assist the disadvantaged children in Northern Nigeria, we built 165
special schools known as “Almajiri Schools” that integrated Islamic
culture into Western education.
The foundational theme of my Administration was ‘The Transformation
Agenda’. It was conceived to engage the latent potential in the entire
nation, and to stimulate and enable higher productivity. And this was
also the foundation of our youth development drive. The Transformation
Agenda sought to address the problems of youth job creation, with
emphasis not just on getting our young citizens employed, but in
assisting them in acquiring the right skills, and providing the
requisite support. This was to enable them set up and run their own
businesses, thereby becoming employers of labour themselves.
In Nigeria and most African countries, there are well-educated
young people. The problem is how to create opportunities for them. My
Administration came up with various programmes to encourage young
entrepreneurs. The most popular was the Youth Enterprise with Innovation
in Nigeria – YouWIN. It was a unique intervention launched in 2012,
which targeted youth with unique business proposals in startups and the
expansion of existing enterprises. YouWin was structured as a
competitive cyclic initiative which invites and reviews Business Plans
submitted by Youth. Young people who wanted to be entrepreneurs were
asked to submit their business proposals. The best business plans were
chosen on the basis of relevance, profitability, demand and
practicability. The winners were trained and given grants.
YouWIN was multi-sectoral – cutting across light manufacturing,
food processing, and the services sector. The motivation for the
programme was for young people to establish SMEs, and create jobs for
other young people, with the expectation that some of these would grow
into large scale businesses. In addition to YouWin, under our broad
based Agricultural Transformation Agenda, we developed the Youth
Employment in Agriculture Programme (YEAP) – and like many of our other
youth programmes, we incorporated the youth themselves in its design.
This took a complete value chain approach from farming to processing and
marketing. Just like in the YouWIN initiative, my Administration gave
young farmers grants and training. The young people who were involved
were called “Nagropreneurs”.
We also launched The Graduate Internship Scheme (GIS). The
objective of this was to provide temporary work experience for fresh
graduates, to enhance their capacity to attract permanent jobs. Eligible
graduates are posted to corporations and companies in the private and
public sectors. They received practical training and mentorship for a
one-year period, within which remuneration is paid by the government.
This enabled the young graduates to acquire relevant experience. We also
increased the allowances due to Youth Corp members by more than 100
percent in 2011. This was in line with our policy of youth empowerment
and development.
To ensure that the Nigerian youth benefit massively from the ICT
revolution, we created a special Ministry of Communication Technology.
We wanted the Nigerian Youth to be self-employed and exploit the
advantages of ICT. The Ministry, among other things, improved broadband
penetration, and set up ICT incubation centres in Lagos and Calabar.
The efforts of the young software engineers at the Lagos
Co-Creation Hub (CC Hub) became so successful that it did not only give
birth to many thriving start-ups, but their activities also attracted
the attention of Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg who chose it as his
first stop during his first ever visit to Africa.
One sector we deliberately encouraged to stimulate job growth for
the Nigerian Youth was the Nigerian entertainment industry. We
identified Nollywood as a sector that can employ many young people. We
provided a grant of $200 million and for the first time, Nollywood
became a major contributor to our GDP. In 2014, Nollywood contributed
1.4 percent to our GDP.
The sporting industry was also not left out. We encouraged our
young people in that sector. I was to launch a Fund to encourage
sporting activities in the country but I had to bow out by May 29, 2015.
Nigeria has a crop of talented youth but the nation has not properly
keyed into the global sports industry. The Fund would have been a
catalyst for developing the Nigerian sports industry by promoting
training, welfare of athletes and manufacturing of sporting equipment,
among other things.
I will conclude this by urging contemporary African leaders to see
youth entrepreneurship as a collective project transcending national
boundaries.
I believe in the Nigerian youth and indeed the African youth. My
conviction is not only an emotional one, but one grounded in my
experience with youth from all over the continent. You will agree that
foremost in the minds of many youth, is a desire to develop their dreams
and potentials. Placing them closer to the driving wheel, does a lot
for their confidence.
Despite incredible challenges, Nigerian youths are achieving great
things and placing Nigeria positively on the world map. Nigerian youths
are an inspiration to their leaders.
I once said that I was not elected president of Nigeria to spread
poverty; I was elected to generate and spread wealth. My belief in this
regard is that getting a job or being a worker cannot completely cure
the disease of poverty. It is only your own business that can provide
such security and give you the financial freedom you need to prosper.
That was why my Administration introduced these initiatives and
policies, to enable Nigeria’s youths take their own destinies in their
hands.
You can appreciate that there was a lot of emphasis on education
during my time at the helm of both my State and my nation. This is
because the richest people today are those who develop ideas and
commercialise them. Viable ideas can only come from educated minds, and
money pursues ideas. My three flagship programmes i.e. the gifted and
talented children schools in Bayelsa State, the Presidential Special
Scholarship Scheme for Innovation and Development and the ICT Incubation
Centres (Co-Creation Hub) were geared towards developing that calibre
of youth.
We may not have been perfect, but we did our best, and our best
yielded an era of unprecedented economic growth for Nigeria. A growth
that proved the truism that a nation’s wealth is not underneath the
ground but between the ears of her people.
Under my watch, Nigeria was projected by CNN Money to be the third
fastest growing economy in the world for the year 2015 and rated as the
largest economy in Africa and the 23rd in the world by the World Bank
and the IMF, with a GDP above half a trillion US dollars.
These, in a nutshell, are some of the ways we were able to promote
youth enterprise; a topic that I know is of utmost interest to many of
you here.
About the Author:
Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GCFR) is former president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
No comments:
Post a Comment