The Senate on Wednesday urged the Federal Government to set up a sustainable unemployment fund for the payment of living stipends to jobless Nigerians until such persons secure any kind of employment.
The Senate also urged governments at all levels to declare emergency on the provision of employment to the youth of Nigeria.
The upper chamber further urged the Federal, State, and Local Governments to revitalise existing industries, build new ones, and provide a conducive and enabling environment for the Private Sector to build more industries in the country.
Besides, it called on the government through the Ministry of National Planning, “to put up mechanisms and programmes that would provide employment for our teeming unemployed graduates/youth at all tier of government.”
These resolutions of the upper chamber followed the consideration of a motion titled: “Escalating rate of unemployment in the country” moved by a former Deputy Senate President, Senator Ike Ekweremadu.
Ekweremadu in his lead debate urged his colleagues to be alarmed that the huge number of graduates being turned out annually by the nation’s tertiary institutions without requisite employment spaces to absolve them.
According to him, the ugly development represents a time bomb waiting to explode.
The Enugu West Senator noted that a report published by the National Bureau of Statistics in 2019 stated that Nigeria’s unemployment rate stood at 23.1 per cent of the workforce in the third quarter of 2019.
He lamented that according to a statement credited to the Minister of Labour and Productivity, Senator Chris Ngige, showed that Nigeria’s unemployment rate will hit 33.5 per cent by 2020.
He urged the upper chamber to be worried that “any nation with such number of the unemployed, but employable youth population, is only sitting on a keg of gunpowder.”
He further called on his colleagues to be perturbed that the most pressing demand on the hand of every legislator and public officer in the country today is the rising number of Curriculum Vitae and application for employments from constituents and Nigerians.
