Open Letter To The President:
Goodluck Ebele Azikwe Jonathan

Title: Where God Weeps: A Place Called Nigeria. By: Ehis Abuya

I don't mind wasting the last drop of blood in my small body or exhaust the vital capacity of my lungs till I run out of breath, If that's what it would cost me to write you so long a letter just one more time with steady hands and an open mind. "Just this one piece" before I die on behalf of all the unemployed graduates and youths in Nigeria under the aegis of National Association of Unemployed Graduates (NAUG)!

It might never have occurred to you, your Excellency, that you are the most powerful African as the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria - a man overseeing 170 Million old men and women, vibrant young black children with about 250 ethnic groups, diverse tongues, highly productive and resourceful set of individuals.

We quite understand your zeal to invest in the next generation of our country’s youths by the various agenda and programs of your administration such as the YouWin projects, SMEDAN, SURE-P amongst other initiatives aimed at tackling the far-reaching malady of UNEMPLOYMENT in our country but sir, all these has done absolutely nothing in reducing unemployment in Nigeria. Instead it has been a means of exploiting unemployed graduates and hopeless job seekers.

I am very sure you are aware that Mr Abba Moro and the Nigerian Immigration Service scammed us N1000 each and nothing has been done about that incident since. Mr President, only the families of those that died, as a result of the stampede, were compensated with jobs. Sir never has it been known in any part of the world that death could be a prerequisite for employment while the multitudes were left wandering the streets asunder. Sir, my heart bleeds that the unemployed graduates of Nigerian institutions of higher learning still roam the streets hoping that one day the promises you made to us while campaigning some years back would be made manifest in their lives!

Sir, you have been campaigning about attracting foreign investors into Nigeria as a means of job creation - that sounds like a fabulous idea to any average Nigerian but I completely disagree with due respect. Yes. Not so long ago, sir, you said in one of your speeches that “Our economy has since been rebased and it is now the largest in Africa; consequently we are now the 26th largest economy in the world and the largest trading partner of the U.S. in Africa". I was about jubilating when I heard over the radio that most of our foreign investors just pulled $584 million out of the Nigerian Stock market as announced by the Nigeria Stock Exchange (NSE) in October.

The NSE recently experienced a sharp decline in market capitalization due to foreign investors' exit from the market in anticipation of the negative impact of the decline in crude oil price on our Naira's exchange rate. Sir, its obvious by now that foreigners are only here to milk our juicy resources and abscond when things go wrong. How many foreigners would stay when things start crumbling? Since you are a very busy man I would like to update you on the operations of some foreign companies in Nigeria. These foreign investors come into Nigeria, register their mutifarious businesses and use Nigerians as cheap labour. Most times, graduates end up not been employed and the lucky ones are usually under-employed irrespective of their requisite qualifications.

Graduates serve these outsiders as errand boys thereby defeating the purpose of the FG's initiative. They bring in their less qualified manpower under the guise of being expatriates to boss their better qualified Nigerian professionals, and in the process thereby remunerating them better than their Nigerian counterparts. Nigerian graduates are subjected to all sorts of inhumane treatment by these foreign sharks on their own soil! Mr President its the norm everyday by these Koreans, Indians and other Asian foreign investors as well as our South-African brethren!

So why not invest in us the gifted youth instead? Human capital is the greatest gift God has blessed us with; as such I would really urge your Excellency to utilise these potentials . The white guys perfectly understand this concept and therein lies the secret of their success. We hear of visa-lotteries here and there, which are absolutely nothing more than modern day slavery. Nigeria keeps losing all her best brains to other countries due to a dearth of decent welfare packages to put good food on the table. As at 2010, statistical excerpts obtained from the National Manpower Board and Federal Bureau of Statistics showed Nigeria has a youth population of about Eighty (80) million representing 60 percent of the total population of the country. Sixty four (64) million of them are unemployed while one million six hundred thousand (1.6 million) are under-employed! Other sources have it that 1.4 million graduates enter into the job market annually.

Investing in us shouldn't be a Mission-Impossible sir! "Nigerian graduates are not unemployable" is the usual refrain these days yet it's possible to engage most if not all unemployed graduates, regardless of their qualifications, in commercial and mechanised agriculture provided the right enabling environment is guaranteed! Just like any good father will, you can also motivate those graduates with lower grades instead of castigating them thereby frustrating them into becoming hoodlums. Why will first class graduates be jobless for years or as a means of upgrading themselves, still have to cough out huge sums of money to get post-graduate degrees, even in the Federal Universities? A case of paying the devil for the harm he has caused you!

I sincerely believe the challenges we have are in the areas of education and agriculture; only if these two are tackled will we be able to beat our chests and shout hooray. Let's go straight to agriculture because a child with nothing in the tommy cannot learn anything for sure, and if I may ask what has happened to our Agricultural sector that provided all the finance needed to host FESTAC '77 back when no other African countries had enough funds to spare, what happened to our Agriculture that built Obafemi Awolowo University, the University Teaching Hospital and Cocoa House all in Ibadan? Nigeria currently has large, untapped investment opportunities in agri-business, the lands are fallowing away for nothing, yet graduates and youth are still jobless and food availability is still a big issue. Its won't cost the Government much to organise the youths and provide them with all they need to produce food to feed the teeming populace.

Let's take a look at a few foreign companies operating in Nigeria:

1) MTN & Airtel - week after week, MTN keeps swindling 50 Naira each from millions of MTN subscribers charging them for ringtones and other third-party services without their consent. Are these the kind of investors we actually deserve?

2) DSTV & GOTV - they render poor quality services and yet they charge arbitrarily by the minute. Nothing has been done about the bad signals relayed during rainy and windy seasons yet they charge exhorbitantly notwithstanding the poor services they render.

3) Nigerians are fully aware of the dealings of several multinational companies like Shell, BG, Agip, Saipem, Sapetro etc., all operating in the oil-rich Niger-Delta region. How sustainable is our land and how drinkable is our water after their exploration or is it exploitation? Now its common practice for foreign oil companies claiming to spend over 900 million naira building a unit of line block of six classrooms in host communities as their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)!!!

These foreigners end up inflicting us with the viruses of fraud and corruption. They manipulate loopholes in the signed MOU agreements and collaborate with some corrupt Nigerian partners to take advantage of the masses. The word corruption itself is a foreign language to us - no wonder its has no direct meaning in most of our major ethnic languages.

So long as we continue to neglect the youth and keep investing in foreigners, Nigeria would continue to be a land were God weeps endlessly! Jobless youth would continue to settle for crime because it pays. Insurgency would continue, foreigners would keep exploiting us and taking us as slaves, the youth we think we have would all migrate and help build foreign lands rather than help develop their fathers' land. Thanks sir.

GEJ till 2019!!!

GEJ, your attention is desperately needed here

temitemi1:
GEJ till 2019!!!

Smh

hmmmmm... What a nice write up...

May Almighty God bless you for this thoughtful piece and make our President see where our shoes (Unemployed graduates) is pinching us because Almighty God is the only one that can help us in this country...

God Bless Nigerian Graduates

God Bless NAUG

God Bless Nigeria


#We Shall Win Through To Absolute Victory#

SHALOM

Go learn how to be a farmer and stop being lazy!

Am not sure this dude read this to the end at all! where is your farm? Or you think people just go into farming just like that?

"well stupid people also have opinions"