A nation is as promising as the prospects of her youthful populace. Any government that wants to leave a legacy must focus on the youths. The reason is simple, the middle aged work to sustain the senior citizens and the children. Good leadership is people-centric, Nigeria on my mind.
At this stage of our national life, it is obvious that Nigeria needs massive foreign investment for the much desired industrial development. East or West, a lot is required, from infrastructure upgrade, to rail transportation, to industry and to real estate. Standing tall is Nigeria/China trade partnership which has gained a lot of mileage in recent times. Promising as it looks, if we don’t have a policy shift now, we may soon find out that the future of Nigeria has been completely sold out.
Nigeria is attracting huge investment from the Far East for the right reasons but we need a policy response to this idea of foreign investors importing their labour force alongside their technology in an unemployment riddled economy like Nigeria where hundreds of thousands of able bodied and qualified young men and women roam the streets for lack of what to do.
Foreign investors import their labour to the lowest unskilled workers to come and live off our scarce employment opportunities. They come in large numbers suggestive of shortage of indigenous job seekers. More worrisome is the absence of knowledge transfer and this gets me really worried. For lack of policy, these foreign investors import their principal managers and technical instructors from their home country. That is fine in itself but qualified Nigerians in such companies are not trained in specific roles to aid knowledge transfer.
Nigerians are left to do the menial jobs while the owners of the technology keep the key to the manual. What this connotes is that we may forever remain subservient to these investors as we continue to depend on them for the maintenance of these technologies which are sure to wear as days turn to years. How disturbing for a nation already in distress.
It is an anomaly for a foreign investor to have the opportunity of an investment destination and still be at liberty to import half of the workforce from his country. If we want to bequeath a future to our children that they can call their own, we need a policy to mandate foreign investors to have a reasonable balance of managerial positions for the sake of knowledge transfer. Beyond that, we should discourage the import of semi skilled and unskilled labour force when our youths idle away in their own country.
Alan Lakein said that “planning is bringing the future to the present so that you can do something about it now.” The future Nigeria deserves is one that empowers her citizens with policy backups to create employment opportunities for indigenous workers, lest we turn our employable workforce to fetchers of water and hewers of wood in their own country.
Akin Oluwadare Jnr
26 July 2021
