Cheta Nwanze: Unemployment Is Nigeria’s Biggest Security Challenge

So the state governors will meet with the Prez today over the deteriorating security situation in the country. What one hopes is that during the tête-a-tête, they will gist about the economic situation. Make no mistakes about it, when you have a scenario in which 48,000 souls have been added to a labour market that is already bursting at the seems, then your security situation can only go south. Our biggest national security challenge in Nigeria, is the unemployment situation and we are tired of hearing statistics about “the number of jobs created”. The truth is this: if those jobs have really been created, no one will need to announce it.

Sadly, our state governors seem to have found an easy cop out in laying everything at the feet of a hapless FG. Thus it was that when the FG a few days ago, contributed $5 millions for a study on how to restore the receding Lake Chad, it somehow passed under a lot of people’s radars. It should come as no surprise that tensions in the Borno area have gone up as the lake has receded. Lake Chad, which used to provide livelihood for a good number of the denizens of the Borno area, receded by a factor of 17 in just 38 years. In that time, the idle hands around it in Niger, Chad, Cameroon, and Nigeria, have found some other use for their time. Killing people.

The argument has been made a lot of times in the past that most of our insecurity problems in Nigeria are economic, and a lot of events bear that belief out. Thus it was that the booming economic activity of cattle rustling got a boost over the last three days as 625 cattle changed hands in often violent fashion, with, err, even more violent sounding threats made. I wonder what Comrade Nyako will say about this one when he meets with the Prez later today. Maybe he will ask the help of a famous seer…

Bits and Bobs

There’s a move to withdraw N285 billions of police pensions from the current, independent, administrators, to the supervision of, the police. Expect more videos of angry men-in-black hitting the airwaves.

Speaking of men-in-black behaving badly, an unnamed man-in-black wasn’t given the memo that Anambra signed the Child’s Rights Act in 2012. He “married” his pastor’s daughter, and after an initial denial, offered N20,000 for upkeep, which pastor has turned down. Negotiations continue.

We’ve all seen that video of the babe who got a drink of muddy water because she forgot to give a man-in-black some fish. Turns out that the incident actually happened last year, the family reported it and were ignored, and action only commenced after the video surfaced and went viral. I need to improve my video recording skills as a matter of urgency.
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Cheta Nwanze writes from Lagos Nigeria

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