Mandate Secretary for the newly established Youth Development Secretariat in Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA), Mr. Abdullahi Suleiman Ango has warned that Nigeria is currently sitting on a time bomb with the number of youths currently in National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) orientation camps across the country.
Ango,Ango who raised this alarm on Friday in Abuja while speaking as a panellist at a High-Level Youth Engagement Summit put together by YouthhubAfrica with support from ActionAid Nigeria, informed youths that there are no vacancies in government departments and urged them to key into the Youth Empowerment Scheme (YES).
Analyzing a report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) which revealed that 75 percent of Nigeria’s populations are youths, Ango advised youths to look for opportunities in agriculture and other digital businesses instead of thinking about securing a job.
He stated: “I told my friend that Nigeria is sitting on a time bomb if I am not mistaken after we declared open the orientation camp for is batch B, stream two, the population I saw there if I am not mistaken are more than 3000 corp members just in FCT and we have similar number across the federation. where is the job when there are no vacancies in government.”
The mandate Secretary disclosed that the secretariat will implement its mandate of providing empowerment, skills, and capacity building for youths in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
He added: “Our mandate is to provide skills and capacity building for youths. Our mandate also is to engage in entrepreneurship. Our mandate ultimately, is to create an independent individual in the community.
“And let me encourage you, there are what we call YES, key into them because when you look at successful people today on earth, they are not government officials. They are entrepreneurs, so meaning our mandate is going to be providing opportunity for us to be well educated on the need to be individual and independent.
“You must not go with the government before you became a rich person. I don’t know if you understand at this point, I will encourage us to go into agriculture because there is money in agriculture.
“You can be a farmer at your comfort zone in your house, fish farming, poultry. These are things that you can do at your comfort zone.
“About securing job. Don’t even deceive yourself talking about securing job now. We have digital marketing. I hope you know that these are businesses that we should start thinking of. These are our mandate”
