Most Graduates Can't Do Jobs they're Employed For, says Pantami

According to the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Ali Pantami, most graduates from Nigerian colleges are unable to do the tasks for which they were hired.

Pantami spoke out against the habit of Nigerian graduates pursuing government jobs rather than pursuing entrepreneurship, which allows them to employ others and thereby close the country's unemployment gap.

On the occasion of the award presentation event for the Katsina National Talent Hunt Challenge, which took place in Katsina on Tuesday, the minister of information and digital economy made the comment.

According to him, "As the situation is today, most of our young people after graduating from school are not in anyway thinking of entrepreneurship, they are only interested in looking for government employment.

"So, the Main challenge is not unemployment, I am not discarding unemployment but the major challenge is unemployability – A situation where I cannot be able to do the technical work that my certificate has stored that I have studied. 

"So it is because of this, that I am very proud of what His Excellency (Governor Masari) {is doing.} has initiated here and I think it is good for other governor’s in the north to immediately copy from him."

"These people we are here to congratulate today, by implication, are prospective job providers," Pantami added, citing the prize winners of the Katsina National Talent Hunt Challenge as an example. 

"But if we're only here to honor folks like my humble self, who have a lot of degrees, we'll be honoring potential job searchers in places where there aren't any."

As a result, Pantami stressed that the "only way to strengthen the Nigerian economy is to address the issue of unemployment and unemployability by giving more attention and preference to youths who have amazing ideas and are eager to be self-sufficient so that they may employ others in return."

Pantami urged government officials at all levels, as well as well-intentioned individuals, to "focus more on identifying our brilliant variants, the young people, by providing them with all the necessary support in order to bring a paradigm shift in which we would be producing potential job providers rather than potential job seekers."