Minister of
Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, in this interview speaks on two
years of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration; interventions in the
labour and employment sector, new national minimum wage and government’s future
plans.
How would
you assess the Muhammadu Buhari administration two years after; especially in
area of job creation?
In the APC
manifesto, with which we asked Nigerians to give us votes, we said we are going
to do three things; first that we shall fight insurgency, bring terrorism to an
end in Nigeria and make for security of lives and property which is the major
thing any government owes her people as enshrined in the Nigerian Constitution,
Section 14:3, that is the cardinal objective of any government.
So when you
talk about our manifesto, we have done well in the area of security; Boko Haram
is lifeless, it has been decapitated and you can take it that we have triumphed
over them, they no longer hold any Nigerian territory, they held 14 local
governments in Borno before we came, they held six in Adamawa, they held three
in Yobe State and flew their flags there, today all that is history.
We have
recovered 50 percent of the Chibok girls so to say and we will recover more
because Boko Haram now know that they are no longer a fighting force, so they
are now at round table to negotiate and this is part of the negotiations that
are going on. When an army wants to surrender, they go to negotiation, they go
to the table.
We also have
militants in the Niger Delta, we have taken that on through dialogue, through
carrot and stick and you can see that normalcy is coming back. There were some
misconceptions that the government of APC that came was an Islamic government,
the government of the north, they threw away Niger Delta’s son and replaced
him; those are misconceptions, a government must come from a zone in the
country. President Muhammadu Buhari came from the North West zone and became
president, so on security, you can give us pass mark.
The same for
internal security; the Nigeria Police and Department of State Services have
done well. It is no longer business as usual, when you had even collusion in
high places, we had to fight corruption in our party manifesto and today
corruption as a cankerworm knows that it has been fought, it is fighting back
as they say, but I can tell you that the public service in Nigeria today is
more alive to its responsibilities, it has been sanitized, people are now
afraid to take money anyhow, looting is limited; it is not a spree as before
and the loots are being recovered and being put into national budget for
appropriation.
Why I have
to go through this before I answer your question is because all these things
are a gamut that are intertwined and interlinked with one another, because if
you have corruption, you cannot have resources to create jobs. Job creation to
be specific is a multi-faceted; multi-sectoral affair involving all strata of
the economic chain of the country; we have the public sector and the private
sector. The public sector is the government, ministries, departments and
agencies; in the organized private sector, we have chambers of commerce and
their commercial activities, Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) and
their industries, we also have National Association of Small and Medium
Enterprises, these are the people who create jobs and they create 80 per cent
of jobs in any economy. Nigerian economy is not different but because of where
we found ourselves, the public sector in Nigeria is creating about 40 percent
of the job needs of the country.
We had an
instantaneous oil price drop when we came in, and as the prices were dropping,
because of militancy, Nigeria couldn’t maintain oil facilities, there were
vandalism of oil exports terminals and oil pipelines. So, Nigeria could not
even meet its OPEC output of 2.2 million barrels per day, at one point we were
doing only 1.2million barrels per day last year, it was that bad, around August
to October last year, in fact starting from June we didn’t do more than 1.4
million barrels at an oil price of 35 dollars per barrel. There was no money to
create enabling environment for jobs to be created by the private sector. What
is the enabling environment that we need here, we need power, electricity.
After
electricity, you will need infrastructural roads and railways, you need some
transport for people to move goods from one end to another for Agriculture
products to come out, and so with the drop in revenue, we have to fight for our
lives, we fought for the economic life of the Nigerian people, what do we do,
we now said diversify into agriculture and mining. Jobs were created from
mining, jobs were created from agriculture because those farmers you see have
created jobs for themselves, they created jobs for some of their children who
cannot get jobs, they have created jobs for their daughters and wives and so
they became the blue collar job people.
Why blue
collar and not white collar jobs?
Everybody
thinks that creating jobs is in the white collar job industry so that people
can sit in air conditioned offices, people would ride in cars; no it is not all
jobs that entail that. There is what we call the blue collar jobs which
agriculture and mining provide, there is also blue collar job which people get
by training, it require skills as electricians, plumbers, tillers, POP layers,
carpenters, tailors, hairdressing salon persons, bakery, they are all blue
collar jobs, so government decided that these are the areas that we have to
encourage people.
In that
wise, government also decided that because we have found ourselves in this
downturn in economy, we are not able to create immediate 3million jobs that we
promised Nigerian people, we also need to intervene directly and create jobs
and that gave rise to the N-power programme by which we decided that 500,000
youths from the streets, from the army of the unemployed, should be engaged.
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