ABUJA – Federal Government has vowed to honour the memory of the dead Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) applicants by creating more jobs.
Speaking at the inaugural Housing Stakeholders’ Implementation Summit in Abuja yesterday, the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said: “The best way to honour the memory of youths, who died at the Immigration recruitment, is for us to create more jobs.”
“There is a lot of distress in the country and people are questioning whether the government has created the 1.6 million jobs it claimed to have created last year. The answer is, it has, according to the information from the National Office of Statistics. However, the problem is we have 1.8 million entrants into the job market every year. So, job creation has not caught up with the number of people entering the job market.”
She noted that government is caught between “creating 1.6 million jobs vs. 1.8 million needed per year. So there is a 200,000 job deficit per year. In addition, we have a pool accumulated over time, of unemployed people amounting to 5.3 million and a pool of under-employed people (those working but the job is not full time) of 13.6 million. So Nigeria has a difficult unemployment challenge accumulated over the years.”
Dr. Okonjo-Iweala said she hoped the first target of creating jobs for new entrants of 1.8 million was almost in sight, adding: “Once we reach that on a steady level, we can focus on creating more for the unemployed and under-employed pool.”
She said the summit had given the government “the opportunity to stand true to the memories of those who died seeking Immigration jobs.”
Well-functioning housing markets, she said, enabled savings, wealth creation and entrepreneurial development, “as a result, housing can address two interrelated policy priorities of poverty reduction and economic growth through enterprise development.”
According to Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, “we need to work harder and faster to create more jobs for our youths. We are focusing on housing because this sector can increase the number of jobs in addition to growing the economy. This sector will create jobs for builders, carpenters, plumbers, managers, interior decorators… so many jobs.”
She identified two parallel working groups mandated to analyse and deliver on the two major constraints identified as mitigating against harnessing the full potential of the sector.
These are the Housing Finance group, chaired by the Ministry of Finance and includes partners: CBN, PMIs, World Bank, IFC, commercial banks, NAICOM, etc.; and land and land titling issues, mandated to review extant land regulations and registration processes to determine how best to ensure a more transparent and simplified access to land and C of O s.