Why I Believe Nigerian Graduates Are As Employable As Ever (Part 1)
The elites misrepresent the unemployment problem
Nigerian university graduates have become victims in a system suffering from a gross shortage of economic opportunities. Youth unemployment has reached a crisis point. One in every two Nigerian youth is either unemployed or underemployed.
Ironically, people who strolled into their first jobs three or four decades ago without breaking a sweat are quick to blame the younger generation for lacking the required quality. They use slurs like “lazy”, “half-baked” and “unemployable” to describe recent graduates.
This leaves a rhetorical question. If Nigerian graduates are now half-baked, when were they ever fully baked?
People talk a lot about how the quality of education was so high in the 1960s and 1970s. But the economy has gradually deteriorated over the last few decades under the watch of the same people who were products of the era of so-called high-quality education.
Can we then argue that the fully baked generation supervised the economic decimation of the country? Can we hold them responsible for destroying a system that once worked? Are the fully baked generation not guilty of destroying the ladder that helped them climb making it impossible for those coming after them to rise?
You can see where this discussion is heading already. I will not go there. I will not apportion blames to our parents, uncles, and aunties. I know their hands were tied. I know they would have done better but for certain constraints like the military dictatorship, corruption, nepotism, and many more.
But it’s important we leveled the ground a bit.
Meet the Boyoyo brothers
Ayo Boyoyo was 22 when he graduated from the University of Ibadan in 1964. A job, a house, and an official car were waiting for him. His brother, Musa Boyoyo joined the foreign affairs office upon graduation from Bayero University, Kano in 1968 and was deployed to the Nigerian High Commission in London.
Their younger brother, Emeka Boyoyo graduated from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) 10 years later. Emeka did not get a house and an official car but he had three job offers before he graduated. In his final year at UNN, Emeka struggled to keep up with the various job fairs and campus recruitment drive of several top companies.
All Boyoyo brothers got their jobs straight out of the university without any prior work experience. Rather, they benefited from all kinds of on-the-job training to acquire the necessary skills all-expense paid by their employers. In those days, Ayo and Emeka frequently traveled overseas to attend training courses. It was common for both Ayo and Emeka to be in London at the same time for training and congregate at Musa’s London home for a family reunion.
Ayo Boyoyo is enjoying a well-deserved retirement after a glorious and rewarding civil service career. Musa retired as an ambassador and lives in the United States. Emeka Boyoyo sits on the board of several companies in Nigeria.
The Boyoyo family is a model of a Nigerian success story — all facilitated by domestic opportunities and home-grown resources. The teams and companies these successful Boyoyo brothers have managed or presided over during their careers have been made up of Nigerian graduates.
The Boyoyo brothers are living their dreams, their lives, and that of their children and grandchildren all secured. But they are oblivious to the plight of the masses. They have failed to acknowledge that the privileges they enjoyed in their youthful days are no longer available to the new generation of Nigerian graduates. They are blind to the fact that the ladder that the system provided to aid their upward mobility in the 1960s and 1970s have all disintegrated beyond repairs.
The Boyoyo brothers strongly believe Nigerian graduates are “half-baked” and “unemployable”. This kind of sweeping assertion and blanket indictment of the Nigerian graduate is now common among the older generation. They moan and gruntle about how the youths are waiting for everything to be handed to them on a platter of gold.
Ironically, Nigerian graduates are lazy, half-baked, and unemployable if their surname is not Boyoyo. The Boyoyos are a different breed. They can still pick and chose where to work even if the unemployment rate is 50% while others carry around the stereotypical “unemployable” tag.
The Boyoyo children and grandchildren are everywhere — civil service, banking, oil, and gas. There is no shortage of employment opportunities for any of the Boyoyo children or grandchildren. For example, Halima Boyoyo is a 23-year-old University of Lagos graduate. For some reason, Halima is one of the few new-generation Boyoyo children to school in Nigeria. Halima had a place reserved for her at a government agency. She strolled into the job after completing the mandatory one-year national service.
If Halima Boyoyo can get a job so easily as a graduate of a Nigerian university, it’s an indication that the problem may not be employability but lack of equity in the distribution of the few available employment opportunities.
It begs the question of why you need to have a name like Boyoyo or connected to the name to be able to access viable economic opportunities.
Could it be that the Boyoyo brothers are missing the point or deliberately ignoring the reality?
The reality
Available data shows that Nigeria’s unemployment rate between 1967 and 1998 ranged between 1.7% and 3.2%. In 2020, the unemployment rate is over 30%, and an estimated 38% of the unemployed hold post-secondary qualifications.
The over 300 degree-awarding public and private universities and polytechnics in Nigeria churn out well over 500,000 graduates yearly. It is estimated that about 25 million college graduates are unemployed in Nigeria. This may not be far from the truth if you factor in underemployment.
In 2016, the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR) reported that Nigeria needs to create 3 million jobs per year to retain the unemployment rate at 14%. I guess that figure has doubled since the unemployment rate has more than doubled. According to a World Bank report, in 2018, 450,000 new jobs were created against 5 million new entrants into the labour market. Nigeria ranked 158 out of 183 in the employment and opportunities domain of the global Youth Development Index (YDI).
With an enrolment population of 2 million across the nation’s degree-awarding institutions, the supply of fresh graduates will continue to outpace the supply of job opportunities.
Symptoms of a deeper problem
In 2012, the Dangote Group announced that 6 PhD and 704 Master’s degree holders were among the over 13,000 applicants who applied for their Graduate Executive Truck Driver vacancy.
In 2014, 520,000 Nigerian graduates showed up for a Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) nationwide recruitment assessment test. There were less than 5,000 roles to fill. The confusion and stampede that followed led to about 16 deaths.
In 2018, the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) announced it received 324,000 applications to fill 4,000 advertised vacancies for officer cadre, inspectorate, and road marshal assistants.
Also, in 2018, the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) confirmed that a staggering 700,000 graduates applied for 500 advertised positions in the FIRS, with 2,000 of the applicants holding first-class degrees!
The story of thousands of Nigerian graduates scrambling for a handful of job opportunities is now part of national life.
Wrongs diagnosis, misconceptions, and myths
There is no way you can effectively cure an ailment without an accurate diagnosis. Nigeria cannot solve the unemployment problem without thinking long and hard about the issue. The assessment of the plight of the Nigerian graduate has been wrong and sometimes outrightly malicious.
Some people talk about meeting or interviewing candidates who were not up to par. Let’s face it. If you are recruiting for a role anywhere in the world, you will meet such candidates. If you as an individual did well in all the interviews you’ve ever attended, you should probably be somewhere else by now. The truth is, you cannot generalize the quality of a Nigerian graduate because you interviewed one or two candidates who failed to meet your expectations.
Are we saying there are no sub-par graduates? Absolutely not.
It’s not possible for every student to achieve distinction, merit, or whatever the highest grade happens to be. But it is a mistake to deride an entire cohort of decent people because of a few who happen to fall below the required standard. We can’t even deride those who fail to meet standards. There are so many reasons people go through university without being fully engaged. If the system is fair and equitable, everyone should find their place either in the formal or informal job market.
I have heard people say they’ve met Nigerian graduates who could not write an essay. Again, over-generalization is written all over this kind of thinking. As a former British colony, Nigeria is an English-speaking country. A Nigerian university graduate would have been taught in the English language for at least 16 years. Some of the countries the world is turning to as talent hubs do not speak or write as much English as we do in Nigeria.
By the way, why should all jobs require the ability to write an essay? If essay writing is the only skill that is assessed during recruitment processes, then it is more likely the problem is that of the scarcity of diverse opportunities.
Many years ago, I had a neighbour who was a senior engineer at a manufacturing conglomerate. He was one of the big landlords in the neighborhood and was living the Nigerian dream. That man graduated in the 1980s when the standard of education was supposedly better. His spoken English was not the best, but it didn’t matter. My elderly neighbour joined the workforce when Nigerian graduates still had options. He got his job based on his ability to deliver as an Engineer and not how impeccable his essays or language skills were.
Let’s just assume the Nigerian job market can only accommodate essayist, why not start by providing job opportunities for those who can write an essay? This will take care of at least 80% of the graduate population. That will be a good start.
Some have also argued that Nigerian graduates don’t stick to their calling. “How can an Engineer be working in a bank?” they ask. The question should be, does the so-called Engineer have an alternative? Do you know an Engineering firm that is hiring 1000 graduates in Nigeria? Even in the United States, about three-quarters of college graduates had jobs unrelated to their major. The reason for this may be that there are so many career paths that are open to diverse fields of study.
Volunteering has also come up in many discussions as a way Nigerian graduates can acquire relevant skills. Sounds like a great idea but there is a problem.
How many years do we want a young Nigerian to volunteer his time for free before we consider him or her experienced enough? A Nigerian graduate would have already put in one year of mandatory service to the nation (working for almost nothing) before hitting the job market.
But let’s agree that volunteering is the way forward. Do you have a system where people can volunteer their services in an organized manner free of exploitation? This is a labour market that largely discriminates against experience gained from temporary or contract roles and will not consider years spent in contract positions as relevant. How do you ensure volunteer experience counts during recruitment and selection processes?
Many people argue that entrepreneurship should be part of the school curriculum. I believe this is already happening for so many years now, at least for those studying management sciences. But is the classroom really the place to learn entrepreneurship?
Education generally conditions people for specific roles in society. Education structures an individual to get the right answers and avoid failure. Jon Brosio, an online entrepreneur argues that the education model creates a relationship with failure that isn’t aligned with the fundamentals of entrepreneurship.
No doubt, education has its place. But the issue isn’t a lack of entrepreneurial training or skills. Nigerian campuses are full of young entrepreneurs. Some of them are funding their education from their businesses — trading, fashion, photography, IT, and even educational services. Before startup even became a word, a group of students at the University of Calabar pioneered a campus-based internet services business in the early 2000s.
There is a need to tackle issues of infrastructure and access to finance. This way, small businesses conceptualized on campuses or off-campuses by university students can scale sustainably.
Overall, I think it’s high time Nigerian leaders in the public and private sectors did away with these excuses. If you are looking for talents in Nigeria, you will find them. As a matter of fact, evidence suggests that the job market is saturated with talent far beyond the demand.
End of Part One
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