When the Confounded Keep Quiet

By Okey Ikechukwu

When I met a particularly voluble defender of the political and economic condition of the Nigerian state at a public function last week and he again went on bout how much things were improving by the minute all over the federation, I asked him: “How are your cousins, and members of your extended family faring?” I asked, further: “Would you say you see the dramatic improvement you are talking about in the real Nigerians, not those of us in big cities and big houses pretending to be talking about the actual condition of Nigerans?’’

I felt constrained to ask him these questions because our people say that when majority the people keep quite instead of shouting that there is a snake on the raffia roof, it is either because they are too tired to shout or they know that nothing will come of their shouting. Our people also say that when the elders and titled men are the only ones saying that all is well in a famished society without being challenged by anyone, every sensible observer should begin to smell the wind for danger.

I submit here that nothing is more disturbing in a nation than to have a situation wherein most people no longer believe, or disbelieve, whatever officialdom has to say. The people, not the counterpart group of office and power seekers opposing officialdom, have disengaged, but not in any form of open physical, or verbalized, confrontation. They are just there. Apathetic, yet living. Inundated with “facts and figures” about how their lives has improved, yet vehemently convinced that lies have been elevated to the pedestal of inviolable truth. You see it everywhere and nowhere in particular. You can feel it in the very air you breathe.

As I write, we have the foregoing confronting us as a nation and a people: (1) An economically and politically insensitive environment that is killing big business and not providing enough germinating space for the small ones; (2) A political elite that is largely driven by blind acquisition, consumption and a proclivity for incomprehensible handling of official misconduct: (3) A declining national productivity that is masked by voodoo statistics that cannot simultaneously mask the misery in the land: (4) Limited public understanding of the meaning of political parties, a political culture of electoral irregularities and representation by fraudulent success; (5) Incredibly high preference for survival politics rather than responsible leadership; and (6) A delusional political opposition that is set to continue with its lamentational approach to political opposition, rather than strategic engagement.

It is difficult to believe today that the government can really do much about the value of the Naira, despite declarations to the contrary. Terrorism and general insecurity have laid waste massive farmlands, reduced farmers’ access to their farms and their farm produce, and are outrightly wiping out or chasing away large farming communities.

When financial outflows into the agricultural sector do not yield the expected returns due to insecurity, the projected gains in terms of food availability, food security and forex earnings from food exports go up in smoke.

For traders and others, the problem is “replacement cost”, which I once discussed on this page. To understand the replacement cost narrative, let us suppose that you sell bicycles. If you buy fifty bicycles at twenty thousand Naira each, that would mean that you spent one million naira to stock up your shop. If you sell the bicycles at twenty-five thousand naira each, it will mean that you have made a profit of two hundred and fifty thousand Naira on your current batch of bicycles. It is up to you, whether to save your profit, use it to marry more wives, buy more bicycles or simply replace the exact number of bicycles you bought and sold off earlier.

But what if, after you have sold your 50 bicycles, you find out that the price of bicycles has tripled? This will force you to three times the amount of money you spent before, to buy the same number of bicycles! Thus your “replacement cost” has moved up. If you do not have that amount of money, your business will shrink automatically.

You will then be forced to rent a smaller shop space and also sack not less than half of your workers. That will make more people jobless. It will also increase the number of parents who cannot pay school fees, etc., etc. Which then further means that most sellers who still have some old stock will do “anticipatory” mark-up, because of the difference between their original “procurement cost” and the new replacement cost.

Is that not part of our reality today? Are our foreign exchange problems of today not connected with our taste patterns, limited productivity, elite excesses and poorly integrated national planning? Can a nation with a predominantly consumption-driven economy suddenly catapult itself into the Neverland of foreign exchange El Dorado?

The Igbo man will tell you that you do not borrow money in order to take the Ozo title, or to marry a wife. If you borrow for either of these endeavours, the twin problems of repayments and maintenance will keep you poor for a long time, if not forever.

Are we producing enough to save the Nigerian economy? Is our foreign exchange capacity not constrained because we are not producing, or exporting enough? What is the impact of our energy problems on overall national productivity? If I must buy an electricity generating set to start a pepper grinding business, the demand for generating sets will remain. So will expenditure headings that need not exist.

That is why I think that we should look a little more closely at what I call the unemployability index. Yes, unemployability index!

We know of the employment index. We also know of the unemployment index. But we pay no attention to the unemployability index.

We speak of the employed as people who are engaged in some type of employ, for wages or profit. They may be working for an individual, an organization or for themselves. The unemployed are taken to be those who “have nothing doing”. Is a bandit, kidnapper, or armed robber unemployed?

If you spent six years to obtain a university degree in architecture and you cannot get a job in an architectural firm, or open up your own practice, and you run into a friend who knows of a vacancy in a small hotel, which needs a receptionist. You jump at the job, lest you perish. You are then underemployed in two distinct senses.

In the first sense your capacities completely outclass every demand the hotel will ever make of you as a receptionist. In the second sense, the hotel does not even have enough rooms, or human traffic, to task just your ability to be awake and alert in the hotel’s front office.

And the underemployed are simply too many in Nigeria today. They range from graduates who cannot find what to do, to artisans and workmen whose skills are not being sought by a weather-beaten populace that is writhing in economic anguish and gnashing of teeth.

The unemployable are made up of graduates and non-graduates. Students who obtain university degrees by paying their teachers from start to the point of graduation cannot be employed for anything in their fields of study. A person who did not acquire any vocational skills, or even develop muscles in order to serve as a bouncer or load bearing tout in the market, is also unemployable in that sense.

These people must be “retooled” for value, or they will remain eternally useless to the society and also to themselves; in terms of engaging meaningfully in immediate and remote economic environments. Butt they can become criminals, because of the low entry requirement for these “professions”.

The absolutely unemployable are those who lack economically acceptable survival skills, in terms of the ability to provide goods or services, as well as the type of citizenship education that would make them rule-governed members of their society. They need to be retooled at two levels: the economic and the axiological.

The ignored unemployability index is not readily acknowledged in clear terms and it not being planned for in Nigeria today. The government “empowerment programmes” and job creation initiatives are not tracking their impact or trajectory in real terms. We are all pretending that the millions of beggars all over the federation do not exist. Is anyone tracking job losses and juxtaposing them against claims about job creation, to be sure they are not all cancelling out each other?

By the look of things, not much is changing for the better, despite claims to the contrary.  Matters seem more likely to get much worse, before they get any better. Check out the security situation, an eight-point agenda that we now hear nothing about. Think of ongoing, but reduced, oil theft; when someone is paid billions of Naira every month to protect the pipelines.

All things considered, unemployable Nigerians have become an absolute majority today. This includes intelligent graduates who actually studied for, and got, their academic qualifications, but whose “unemployability” stems from a moral handicap. Their education, socialization and engagements exposed them mostly to the wrong values about leadership, public office, service delivery and much more. If you “employ” them to manage anything, they will go there to serve their personal interests.

See what unemployability has morphed into? Look around you again and answer this question: Is it correct to say that the major crisis facing the Nigerian State today is the failure to work out, and be guided by, the unemployability index in everything it is doing today?

Values create the right mindset for substantive citizenship, rather than nominal citizenship. In our New World Order, wherein anyone with a cell phone and a social media handle is automatically a media owner, broadcaster, Editor-in-Chief and even a television station by himself, we need a rallying call for a gathering of wits. But who will make the call? Who is making it? Who even thinks that such a call is necessary?

The issues and problems raised here demand some reflection. They are cheerfully mutating, and not disappearing. Many more are popping out of every street corner by the hour. The space is being progressively taken over by the unemployable, as loyalty is being withheld from the Nigerian State. This is perhaps understandable when we consider that, in many cases, we have official marauders and state-decorated insurgents passing themselves off as leaders and statesmen in government houses all over the federation.  

But one thing is clear: It would be a great mistake silence for acquiescence, or agreement, is a potentially volatile situation.