To be fair, President Buhari’s predecessor (Goodluck Jonathan) tried a similar initiative known as YOUWIN, a competitive business grant where the best entrepreneurial ideas could win its bearer between five and ten million naira. While the program was well-designed, it soon became in many ways a conduit pipe for corruption and in effect, another white elephant project.
It is too early to tell if President Buhari’s new entrepreneurship framework would follow such equally futile track, but these two attempts at addressing youth and graduate unemployment underplays, if not totally ignores the importance of trying to re-adjust the mind-set of the target demographics.
Despite trying to create avenues to boost youth entrepreneurship and reduce unemployment, nobody has bothered to educate young Nigerians that the classroom-to-cubicle model of upward social mobility is an obsolete idea that no longer necessarily holds true. Education is still of extreme importance, but gainful employment following graduation is no longer a guarantee, and worse is the idea of predicating education to such ends.
Poor parents borrow money, sell lands and belongings to sponsor a child in the university with the consolation that there is a job in the banking hall, civil service, companies etc. waiting for them upon graduation. All these sacrifices are made to see that the child and indeed the family could move from the bottom of the food chain up the economic ladder.
And so, young people go through school with this unfortunate mind-set. When they are out in the real world, they see an entirely disconcerting reality, one they are often scarcely prepared for. Majority of teenagers heading into school are not aware that the world has moved on, and that university is there to equip you not necessarily with the technical abilities to become a professional but to be able to have the level of awareness, creativity and drive required to spot opportunities, create enduring relationships, develop interpersonal rapport that comes in handy irrespective of whatever endeavour one chooses to indulge in the wake of university life.
I feel that the government would never do enough in its push to grow youth entrepreneurship until it begins to invest in massive awareness campaign to alter the classroom-to-cubicle mind-set. This thinking is very germane because on the one hand it fosters in the youths a sense of entitlement just for making it though school. And on the other hand, it hinders them from understanding that one has to bear a personal responsibility for how navigating economic life post- graduation.
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