DEBATE: IS ENTREPRENEURSHIP THE SOLUTION TO UNEMPLOYMENT IN NIGERIA?
IS ENTREPRENEURSHIP
THE SOLUTION TO UNEMPLOYMENT IN NIGERIA?
By:
Dinzei Maureen
An early 18th century
French economist, Richard Cantillon (1755) defined entrepreneurship as “self-employment”.
He described the entrepreneur as the agent who buys the means of production
while bearing all the risks and uncertainty.
The youth unemployment
problem won’t be solved quickly, or easily, and it requires a range of
responses. Along with shorter-term macroeconomic and fiscal policies to help
drive job growth, embedding entrepreneurship at the heart of the education
system is a key, long-term initiative that will help provide an environment
where the dreams of millions of young people to make an impact and start their
own enterprises can be realized.
Entrepreneurship is
government's way of making the youth/ graduates look intellectually lazy and
burdensome as well as telling them that they have been abandoned in the valley
of unemployment. Unemployment rate increased simply because government owned
industries and companies get strangulated by the python of corruption as well
as the refusal of the government to establish new ones. Entrepreneurship in
advanced countries is about innovations, inventions, improvements, expansions,
people and institutional empowerment. Modern and sophisticated skills are being
utilized to manufacture goods and services which culminate into abundant job
creation. Entrepreneurship in Nigeria is of the graduate job seeker told to engage
in bead making, soap making, hair dressing, laundry and so on. These businesses
have neither inventions nor advancement to add to the business practice and the
economy, as they also have little or no impact on the international market. The
government of advanced countries often invest billion of dollars on education
and research, so they always have intellectuals who will offer innovative
products and services to the world. These products and services are initially
developed into small scale businesses as they may even grow into large
enterprises. Only an insane person will keep doing the same thing the same way
and expect a different result. I am yet to see a nation that got developed by
investing so little on the education of her youth and students but spend so
much on SME propaganda.
Still searching for a
nation that gave nothing more than mere, non-professional, common, stark and
non-sophisticated skills/training toher youth and achieved rapid industrial
development.
Secondly, why should we
buy a trailer engine, fix it in a car and try to make it compete with an
aircraft? Why should we make people earn mere skills and expect them to compete
with foreign sophisticated technologies? We have to know that the issue of
local production of goods and services is a serious competition with the
developed nations. Here are some questions for the proponents of entrepreneurship:
·
When will our textile, fashion and leather
industry be able to make products of international standard?
·
When will a Nigerian mechanic be able to
manufacture car engines and other motor parts?
·
When will our furniture makers be able
to make furniture that will compete with the ones made overseas?
·
When will a computer repairer be able to
produce motherboards, memory cards, monitors, just to mention a few?
·
Did America achieve greatness by
emphasizing on vocational trainings on how to make shoe polish, bake cake,
produce detergents, event decorations, frying akara and establishment of
football viewing centres?
·
Did Britain get it right by teaching her
youth how to start a beer palour and salon businesses or by ensuring
technological dynamism?
I
wonder if it is mere phone repair training that brought China among world's
mobile phone producers. Over and over again, I see entrepreneurship and
vocational education as a scam.
THANK
YOU!!
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