I did something in Zimbabwe and I am wondering who will

be stupid enough to do such in Nigeria.

We hired a car (Hyundai Elantra 2018) from Europcar for six (6) months. On my departure day, I drove it to the airport, but the car hire office was closed. My flight was just two (2), hours so no chance of taking it back to town.

While thinking of what to do, a young man (Jack) who identified himself as a staff of Caresafe taxi service at the airport told me that Europcar have closed the office due to Lockdown. He offered to help me in returning the car to Europcar office in the city. All he needed was call credit to contact them.

 

I gave him equivalent of 300NGN for the call credit. I then parked the car, gave him the key, took a picture of his ID and returned to Nigeria.

By close of the day, I recieved a mail from Europcar that the car has been returned.

 

Though, I didn't know the Jack and there was no way of tracing him except by his work ID which was not verified, my mind was at rest that he will hand over the car to the car hire. I trusted him because he's a Zimbabwean. He may be extremely poor and hungry, I know he's contented. Despite the poor economy, people still leave their wares outside on the table till the next day without fear. 

WHO DARE TRY THIS IN NIGERIA?

 

This is not about the government or politics, but the people. These people respect the law. For my six(6) months stay, i heard no single report of crime in the city. The police are unarmed except for stick but are highly respected.

Jack may not even be a christian. I didn't bother to ask for his religion. I didn't trust him because he mentioned the name of a God, he wore collar or carry a holy book . I trusted him because I knew the practice of his people. If he's my country man, i dare not try that. I wonder how we descended this low as a country.

 

I have been suspected and severally interrogated just because I carried Nigeria passport. This has happened in unrelated places, not because of what I have done but because of where I come from.

Anofficer in Lahore was once suprised he couldn't find drugs on me (a Nigerian) even after rigorous scanning.  Once you identify as a Nigerian, people see you as a potential criminal.

 

It is time to repair our identity.

We need to work on our value system.

We need to retrace our steps to find where we missed it.

Maybe we can be right again.

Surviving Nigeria as a Graduate Today

By: Deji Yesufu

Kunle Ojeleye told the story of how he left the shores of

Nigeria as a young graduate back in 1989. He had sought the

help of a number of people; people he felt would ordinarily

help him. These people were friends to his parent but he was

horribly disappointed. None of them came to his rescue. He

eventually took the offer an uncle was providing him to leave

the shores of Nigeria. Ojeleye’s story, which he relayed on his

timeline on Facebook, is similar to what most Nigerian

graduates experience from the mid-1980s, when Nigeria began

to experience a downturn in her economic situation, to this

moment.

When I left school in 2003 and had completed my NYSC, I

spoke with one of my father’s friends on the matter of getting

a job. He said: “Jobs are scarce in Nigeria… but if you will be

patient, it will come. These things take time. The only thing is

that no one knows how long…” I learnt of one man who

graduated from the University of Ibadan and until his death,

sometime in his early 50s, he was never gainfully employed.

Those are the kinds of stories we hear about graduates and

job hunt in Nigeria. In this article, I want to suggest a few ways

Nigerian graduates can survive the harsh economic reality all

around us today in this country.

The first admonition I want to give is that young Nigerians

should have, develop and increase in their sense of

responsibility – generally. A retired civil servant, who lives

close to my house and sells provision, asked me to help his

son get a job where I work. The first thing I asked him was

this: “Baba, your son is looking for job but I have never seen

him in this provision store selling for you.” If I had opportunity

to recommend that boy for a job, I would not because he has

clearly failed in my observation of him.

Our young people need to realize that the work that anyone

will pay for must be a job that will add value to a system.

Gone are the days in this country when free money roamed

the streets of Lagos. Today, if you will earn a Naira, not steal,

you would have to work for it. And since there are no jobs, the

people who will earn these monies are people who have

enough sense of responsibility to recognize needs in people’s

lives and offer themselves to fill that need. But they must also

realize that people grow in their sense of responsibility. A child

that does not know how to offer a hand of help to his or her

parent, under whose roof he lives, is not likely to know what to

do when he or she is in the outside world.

The first thing our young people must do is to quit social

media, abandon the television and develop an attitude for

work that is etched in a sense of responsibility. Today, first

class or second class upper will not save anyone from

unemployment. It is what you can do that will give you a job

and you will not be able to do anything except you have built a

work ethic etched in a thorough sense of responsibility.

The second thing that our young graduates must realize is that

they are almost too late to the Nigerian labor market if the

first time they ever worked was when they left the university.

This is what happened to some of us and we paid dearly for it.

I have promised myself that it will not happen to my children. I

look back now and wonder what I did with those few months

between primary and secondary school; what did I do with my

long vacations in secondary school; what did I do with the

almost 18 months strike between 1994/1995 in the university.

I remember what I did with the latter of these situations: I

learnt how to play chess and spent long hours playing the

game. A game that add nothing to me today except recreation.

There is no reason why children, leaving primary school, and

with a few months on their hands before proceeding to

secondary school, cannot use such a period to learn a trade,

or skill, or follow Daddy or Mummy to the office and learn the

work of a personal assistant. The long vacations during

secondary school can be used to learn some skill. The

mechanic, Tunde Onokanya, here in Ibadan, offers to train

secondary school children in auto-mechanic during their long

vacations. I am thankful to my Dad who took my brothers and

I to learn typing sometimes after my secondary school. All my

essays today come from that skill. Our young people do not

have to spend all their time with season movies or on the

phone; those things are sure ways to poverty.

They must begin to work with their hands the moment they are

out of primary school and are old enough to do some

responsibilities. All of these things will key into a curriculum

vitae and make them stand out from others in the future.

Some others may never even write a CV because in the

process of working, they would have discovered their niche

and must have begun to produce something for the

community they live in that will earn them a lot of money such

that they might have even begun to make money long before

they leave the university. Again, if the first time you are

working is when you left the campus, you are already too late

to the Nigerian labor market. Others would have gained a

head-start that could take you years to catch up on.

Third : VOLUNTEER! I cannot say this enough and thus the

reason why I must bold it at this point. Our young people must

learn to volunteer; they must learn to work for free and while

doing this, opportunities for jobs will open up to them. A heart

for volunteer jobs exhumes from a mind that has a sense of

responsibility. A lot of people are too suspicious of others and

they think that everybody is out to use them. The truth of the

matter is that in the early days of our work life, we would be

used.

In fact I think the way the world works is that you do most of

the hard labor of life in your younger days and earn little; and

then you do less work in your older days and earn more. If a

person despises work and does not have a sense of

responsibility, that shows forth in volunteer jobs, that person

will suffer for it in his older days – when he would need to

work more and earn money to cater for the large

responsibilities that adult life shores up.

Most things about this life are anchored on volunteering. Most

of those who are earning big on a certain job today, first of all

volunteered their time and effort to do those things for free

once. Also, our parents must encourage our young people to

volunteer themselves for work. During my National Youth

Service Corp (NYSC) in Yola, Adamawa State, I worked briefly

for the Deeper Life Headquarters Church in that town. Then I

moved on to work for a construction company, while at the

same time I lived in the Deeper Life Church apartment given

to me.

The State Overseer, Pastor James Akpofure, and the person

who was my first boss, has a son who had learnt computer

hardware repairs as of the time he was just in his early

secondary school. His father told him that he could repair

people’s computers for them but he forbade him from

collecting money for those services. The time will come for

him to collect money but for not now, he was to volunteer his

skills.

Everything that I am today came about by volunteering to

serve other people. I remember working for a Church and

publishing their quarterly magazine. I suffered doing that job; I

could write a book about my experience there. It was a

thankless work and I was often criticized for it. But I left that

church with a reward; a reward that no man could give but

only God. Even the whole blogging thing that I do today is

volunteering to give people information – free of charge – and

not getting anything in return. Most times what I get are

insults; but we press on, knowing that one’s reward remains

ahead. So, young man and woman, volunteer to work. Don’t

complain. Just work and trust God for his own time to pay

back.

Lastly, on this note of volunteering: I would implore parents to

support their young people as they volunteer. Volunteering to

work may not earn them a living wage but it would give the

young person a lot of experience that could prove rewarding

for another job. Parents would have to do what parents do

while your child or ward does the volunteer work: you would

have to support them and hopefully you would not have to do

that for too long before they get a proper job.

Fourth : While waiting for that dream job, you could spend your

time doing what you love doing. Now, loving to eat or watch

TV or talk or keeping a girlfriend is not the kind of thing I have

in mind here. There are hundreds of things people love doing

that can prove rewarding in the days to come. I used to love

writing and when there was no Facebook, I would write into

notebooks and just store them away. What you love doing

may be cooking or singing or writing or driving or helping

others. God created every human being with something they

can do and do without stress.

You must discover yours and learn to do that thing and do it

well. It is something you will ordinarily do without pay; so

hone that skill and someday it may become the means with

which you can earn some extra cash for yourself. Again, this is

premised on a sound sense of responsibility. With time you

can take what you love doing very well, hone it into a workable

skill and use it to produce something that people are ready to

pay a lot of money for. Thus, I enjoin our young graduates to

have useful hobbies and look out for making them into

something that can bring money their way.

Fifth: I want to implore our young people to learn to do the

right thing, always. This might sound moralistic in a way but

the truth of the matter is that our worlds is not so depraved

that people cannot recognize good and reward it. At each

junction life, we would be tempted to cut corners and follow a

short cut; our young people must desist from engaging in such

acts. I finished with NYSC when I was 26. My name still

appeared in the NYSC call-up system twice every year until I

was 30. Throughout this period I had no job but I chose not to

go for another NYSC because it was not the right thing to do.

There are hundreds of other examples.

Somebody told me that his company received 6 Sure-P

enrolments from the Federal Government recently. All of them

called in and said they do not wish to work for him and are

ready to part with ten thousand naira each, every month, if he

would accept them and just sign their documents and pretend

to government that they are working on his company. My friend

wondered at the kind of youths our country was producing.

One would think that the rising religious fervor in our

universities should instill some fear of God in our young

people but this is not the case. Recently, I shared a two-

apartment building with a young man for three years and I just

wondered at how his mind worked. He did not work but was

living in a three bedroom house. After a while, he could not

pay for basic amenities like power. He was eventually evicted.

One could never tell what he was doing to survive. Some

people alleged it was yahoo-yahoo but since I never saw him

in the act, I could not say so for sure. The earth is based on

some laws and I think that those laws are premised on what

we do in life. If we do good, we will reap good; if we do evil,

we will reap that equally. Our young people should commit to

doing what is right, no matter what and trust God for rewards.

As you do this, it is not wrong to apply to companies for jobs.

You can also seek the favor of family members and friends.

You should do everything and anything your friends and

colleagues are doing, within the law, to get a job. But I am

positive that the job that would come to you and be yours

without your having to know anyone, or beg anyone for it, are

the ones that come as a result of practicing and perfecting the

five aforementioned qualities in this essay. I believe there are

many other such qualities. While you endeavor to work and

live responsibly, those qualities will come forth and you

should increase more and more in them. It is possible that

one can so develop oneself in these qualities that you end up

not working for anybody at all and you would be earning good

money at the same time.

One last thing: having done all and even as you do these

things, our young people must learn to wait for their own

rewards. They must eschew greed and the temptation for

quick riches. While you volunteer, you must be patient for the

job to come. While you serve a master, you must be content

with a little pay. You should wait, wait and wait. Let me chip in

a little religious admonition here: the Bible talks about God

being the Father of all creation and as parents provide for their

children, God provides for all his creation. There is a provision

for every man. You would however come into it as you

endeavor to do the right things. These will lead ultimately to

your own good in life; such good that will bring fulfilment, joy

and peace. There is no short cut to success; but there is a

sure way to it. I believe this is the way Providence apportions

good to all creation. And this is the way I believe that young

graduates in Nigeria can survive the harsh economic climate

that Nigeria has found itself in.