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| Unemployed Africans mark May Day in South Africa |
By Honourable Saka
The paradox of celebrating
workers’ day continues unabated everywhere but one can certainly not ignore the
irony here in Africa. Although several
nations celebrate May Day as a day to remember the workers of the world, it is
recently becoming a day for protest groups especially the unemployed masses to
register their dissatisfaction with the political elites. Africa is no
exception. Youth groups have over the years mounted massive protests against
the celebration of May Day on the continent- a celebration they consider to be
‘meaningless’ especially when majority of the African youth are left with no
jobs. "With over 50% of African youth unemployed, it makes no sense for the
continent to consider celebrating May Day”,
says Agyeman Kodua, a final year student of the University of Ghana. Many are
also wondering why governments are celebrating workers day at a time when over
40% of government workers have not been paid for the past 5 months.
In my opinion, there is nothing wrong for any democratic country to
remember the contributions made by the hardworking majority. After all,
democracy ought to represent the views and the needs of the majority.
But how can Africa, a continent whose unemployment rate barely stands at
50% continue to celebrate “workers’ day” without a clear strategy to eliminate the
unemployment cancer from the system?
A quick glance at the current unemployment statistics portrays an
alarming “official” unemployment rates across Africa. As honest and trustworthy as
we know of our governments, if these figures are said to be ‘official’, then
one can only imagine the alarming rate at which the unofficial figures would be
in the various African countries.
As a government worker who had a day off to ‘celebrate’ May Day, I took
some time to do a little research about the workforce. While doing a
little research about the rate of unemployment on the African continent, I came
across some figures and here are only a few:
EAC/SADC/COMESA Region (unemployment):
Mozambique: 60%, Djibouti: 59%, Namibia: 52%, Zimbabwe: 51%, Congo: 51% Kenya: 44%, Swaziland:
40% Burundi: 35%, Angola: 28%, South
Africa 26%, Lesotho: 25%, Ethiopia: 20%, Zambia: 19%, Botswana: 15% etc.
West Africa (unemployment):
Senegal: 49%, Mali: 42%,
Equatorial Guinea: 38%, Ivory Coast: 36%, Nigeria: 28%, Liberia: 18% Niger:
16%, Ghana: 12% etc.
Northern Africa (unemployment)
Mauritania: 33% Libya: 30%, Chad:
26%, Sudan: 21%, etc.
These figures when added up,
translates into over 400 million of people roaming the streets of Africa
without jobs. With such alarming numbers, one always wonders why Africans still
celebrate workers’ day without a clear policy designed to ameliorate the fear
created by the huge unemployed masses. Does it make sense for the 1 billion
Africans to celebrate May Day when most of them are without jobs? If about 400
million of Africans are celebrating workers’ day without jobs, isn’t very
disturbing?
Why Too Much Unemployment?
Having identify unemployment to
be a major problem for Africa, it is a good idea to highlight the major reasons
why unemployment is very high among many African countries. There are quite a
number of reasons but paramount amongst are:
·
Bad
leadership/lack of vision: As a result of bad leadership, there is
certainly no clear policies that aim to address unemployment in Africa. We
currently lack industrialization that creates jobs. Therefore we export
unprocessed agricultural products and minerals, thereby losing money and jobs
to the outsiders. Our under-developed agricultural sector has taken a lot of
jobs off the system. Agriculture alone has the potential to eliminate
unemployment from Africa, yet governments have never considered supporting the
farmers. Many of state institutions that were meant to create jobs have been
sold off to private investors already. These private investors want more profit
for themselves and as such lay off many of the local workers while bringing in
workers from abroad.
·
Bad educational
system: First of all, our educational system is not tailored to address the
needs of our immediate environment. I
have been reliably informed that Copper Belt University in Zambia for instance
is a business school even though the region is so rich with copper! How can
business graduates, mostly accountants contribute meaningfully to the
production of copper without having any health and safety, engineering and
environmental research background? Where are the mining/engineering schools
that will train engineers, health and safety officials to handle our copper
mines? Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana is now
dominated by arts, political and social science courses, living very little
room for science and technical causes. Secondly, the educational system we have
has been training people who come out with the notion that government/society
must employ them. Many graduates therefore do not take any initiatives to
create jobs for themselves. There are many graduates who do not see the need to
be on the field/site but rather they want to be in the offices. They want to
wear suit and tie most often.
·
Corruption:
Often, there are many donor countries who contribute a huge chunk of money
dedicated for Small and Medium scale Enterprises (SMEs). If such moneys were to be
used for the intended purpose, it could boost the expansion of many small
businesses to employ more workers. Unfortunately however, such moneys often end
up in the pockets of the political elites. Many African leaders instead of
spending such moneys to build industries/factories that can employ the youth
rather spend the moneys on their political campaigns/rallies. Some even buy votes
with cash instead of setting up businesses that can employ the young ones.
THE WAY FORWARD:
Educational reform is needed to
address the crises posed by unemployment. We need an educational system that
will be tailored to the needs of our immediate environment. There is no need
for a university which sits on a huge oil and gas reserves to be training
people who can sing and dance as we see in Niger Delta State University, (Nigeria)
which has no oil and gas research department. Our universities must identify
the challenges within their immediate environment and help train more
specialists to address them.
Additionally, every organisation
must dedicate itself to the fight against corruption. Moneys that are meant for
infrastructural development must not end up in offshore accounts somewhere
whiles our people continues to dwell in communities without reliable water
supply.
Governments must dedicate more
resources to the building of industries to help absorb some of the unemployed
youth. This will help the tackle the challenge posed by unemployment such as
armed robbery, prostitution, unwanted pregnancies and the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Until a higher percentage of our
people are adequately employed and dully paid to work, the celebration of
workers’ day will have no useful significance in our society.
Honourable Saka
Project Coordinator, ProjectPan-Africa, (honourablesaka@yahoo.co.uk)
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