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!!