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By newswatchngr.com 16/09/2011 04:55:00

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Written by Bala Dan Abu Friday, 16 September 2011 The problem is acute. Almost every Nigerian family is a victim. It has, at least, one unemployed person. One family quoted in this week’s cover story has nine unemployed members

The problem is acute. Almost every Nigerian family is a victim. It has, at least, one unemployed person. One family quoted in this week’s cover story has nine unemployed members. That is how serious the problem of unemployment in Nigeria has become today.

Getting a job is about the worst problem of our youths today. After many years of schooling which has even become a nightmare itself for students, and the one year compulsory National Youth Service Corps scheme which exposes them to a lot of risk, Nigerian fresh graduates get into the more harrowing phase of life – which is to pound the streets of the nation’s cities in search of jobs that are hardly available.

The frustration that unemployment brings for those engaged in the fruitless search for jobs is the focus of our cover story this week. In the process of investigating the story, we met some of the worst and pitiable cases of joblessness and they spoke to us about their experiences. We also met and spoke with labour leaders, sociologists and economists who also did for us very incisive analyses of the damage which the high rate of unemployment is doing to the affected youths and to the country generally.

In the course of investigating the story, one very important but unfortunate fact came into the open. There are no reliable statistics on how many Nigerians are unemployed or underemployed. The scanty information we got from the Bureau of Statistics is published as a box to help throw a little more light on the problem. Government, we were told by most of the people we met and spoke to, is doing very little to solve the problem but they urged unemployed Nigerians to take solace in the hope raised by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, minister of finance, that job creation will get a lot more attention under the present dispensation.

The story which we have titled: Unemployment – The Plague Haunting Nigeria was written by Anthony Akaeze, assistant editor.