Youth Employment in Nigeria and the Impregnable but Artificial Walls: The Urgency of a New and Inclusive Country

It is becoming patent that decent jobs and wages are fast evanescing from the labour market in Nigeria, leaving more citizens and particularly the youths in the precarity trap. Also erected as megaliths in the path of youth job seekers are impregnable walls which continue to narrow the chances employable youths have to secure decent jobs in the country. Although the artificiality of these walls cannot escape a careful observer, the impregnability of these walls nonetheless cannot also be denied since their anthropogenic, systemic and autochthonous natures have made them into the bugbears they presently are. Youth unemployment has continued to surge because of artificial problems created by the Nigerian state, narcissistic and clannish actions and words of politicians and their military overlords, a partisan public service, a skewed federal system, ethnicity, prebendal and primordial posturing, citizen and indigene dichotomy, quota system and federal character, state capture by an oligarchy, a kleptomaniac and expensive political system and a pseudo democratic state where equality, constitutionalism, human and citizen rights and meritocracy, among other democratic and equalitarian ethos, are treated as virtues that only exist in a political utopia. The youth constituency in the country is marooned and left with fewer noble options. There is therefore an urgent need to create a new country which would affirm inclusion, invest in youth employment, display exemplary leadership and tear down the artificial walls that have retrogressed the country for a long while. This study aims to examine youth employment in Nigeria and how this continues to deteriorate in the hands of existing impregnable but artificial walls, necessitating the creation of a new and inclusive country.