Uganda: Youth Unemployment is a national security issue.

UNEMPLOYMENT

Over the weekend, I struck a rather interesting conversation with some young people on my Facebook chat. These chats started with usual pleasantries and then developed into inquiries about how Canada is and how a young person could migrate to Canada. Two of the youths had graduated from University five years ago and had never secured formal employment.

They felt a deep sense of dejection – that, their country has let them down. One youth had completed undergrad and was summing up a masters in Business Administration, a program that many young people are enlisting. He, too, like the others, had lost any hope for a job after wrecking up his relative’s pockets for fees and scholastic support.

These stories are regular and rampant. Many young people are graduating from colleges and Universities and have simply no start-up capital to invest, little skills and no proper supervision to translate classroom knowledge into a resource for earning a living. At over 83% youth unemployment, we should worry excessively that youth unemployment is of a major security concern.

Certainly, the government is aware of this problem and must be worried about it more than anyone else. However, few aspects of our economy need streamlining. First, we must continuously challenge the people who design our school curricula to tailor curriculum development towards the rapidly liberalising economy. Curriculum should focus on business models, apprenticeships, research, critical thinking, and innovation. Education system should produce curricula that respond to the economy by building skills and competent labour force.

Second, the tradition of graduates hoping to get employment with government or established business needs challenging right from the classroom. With high degree of sectarianism in government, coupled with a slow private sector expansion, the economy is unable to absorb the extra-labour produced annually. Government, on its side, is now behaving like an ethnic enclave where favouritism and tribalism pervades every department. Job opportunities with government are no longer on merit. Somehow, one must have a Godfather or Matriarch to access employment. Blotted bureaucracy, corruption, and ineptitude also stifle the flow and absorption of funds at local governments.

Third, and most important, is for the government to enlighten the population about the operationalisation of the economy. Government today is chocking with an extremely high cost of public administration. The cost of politics and sustaining politicians have diverted critical funding from youth entrepreneurial development and development of infrastructure such as resource centres, recreation centres and centres for social innovations where youths could channel their ideas, energies and synergies.

Fourth, we have to analyse the culture of investment, attitudes towards private venturing, and co-operatives. Young people need mentoring into saving, investing, partnerships, loan servicing, and translation of knowledge. Youths have the energy and ability to learn fast, given the advent of technology that offers them unfettered opportunity to make good of their time and energy to earn a living. Government should strive to make computer skills and internet access, universal and a fundamental right of every youth.

Another challenge we have in Uganda now is the crisis of trust. I recall a young man I met in Ntinda in 2010 who recorded a music album. He was hopeful that his product would generate for him some money. However, he insisted that releasing his album without the videos for each song would be suicidal because he feared that established artists would plagiarise his songs. At that time, he estimated that the cost for a good music video for a beginner was between UGShs1- 2million. This youngster failed to secure the money for the videos. He never surfaced in the industry as a star of his dream.

The intellectual property rights and small innovation fund are crucial for young people to become relevant producers in the economy instead of consuming alien cultural garbage for entertainment. There must be guarantees and safeguards that innovations are encouraged, valued, and protected in this economy. When we leave our youths without guidance and nurturance, we breed insecurity. The apathy among young people now, towards the establishment, is a time bomb about to explode.

End.

The fallacy of Global Poverty Reduction Strategies

POVERTY

My friend Ojotre and his fiancée have travelled through many countries in Africa. They have marveled at the sight of expensive government guzzlers – four-wheel drives - emblazoned with big inscriptions such as “Poverty ‘Eradication’ or ‘Alleviation’ Programs”, and yet everywhere they have visited, unusual forms of poverty confronted them. This couple has wondered as to why African governments extol publicly an onerous task upon which they have no control.

Poverty alleviation is a hoax. Poverty eradication is a myth. One obsession of governments and international donors is this patronage and ruse that they intend to eradicate or alleviate absolute poverty.  Many of these people use that phrase to mean many different things at different levels depending on their role and the powers they hold. Poverty alleviation/eradication could mean exploitation, underdevelopment, political capital, power over (patronage), and imperialism (neoliberal - emerging markets). There is a whole industry and market out there where poverty is a commodity.

What constitute poverty is highly perceptional, relative, and political. As a political object, poverty is framed to justify a mobilizing ideology; as an international development issue, it is framed to conjure a sense of benevolence and sympathy. Incidentally, every effort at eradicating poverty only exacerbates it. Every poverty alleviation/eradication attempt has provided temporary fix and perpetuated worse outcomes for the long term, including producing disease and further helplessness/dependency.

To understand poverty, we have to understand what it is not – wealth, abundance, access, equitable society, power, social class privileges, and the manner in which societies and economies are organized and operationalized. Once we appreciate fully the structural systems that produce, reproduce, and transmit power globally and locally, we then can courageously grapple with poverty as the function of societal inequality resulting from that power relations and its controls production.

Thence, to alleviate poverty one has to focus on the pervasive inequalities in society that deprive people of resources and opportunities. The antithesis of poverty therefore is providing equal opportunity for production and distribution of resources. People can get out of poverty if they have ownership over their means of production and the products of their labor. When people have control over their environment and control over the requisite tools to harness and take sway over their environment, then they can emerge out of poverty. However, in all these poor countries, the glaring lack of infrastructure to support wealth creation and distribution, as well as the unequal rules of global trades and transnational movements, inextricably bind disadvantaged people to absolute loss of control over production, labor, capital, and environment. Poverty therefore is systemic and structural such that “alleviation” or “eradication” are obscurantist strategies.

There is a common observation that if 10 of the world’s richest were to share half of their wealth with the rest of the world, nearly 3.5 billion people, or half the world’s population would emerge out of absolute poverty. This formula applies in every society where enormous amount of wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small percentage of individuals.  

For a meaningful progress in improving life conditions, social and historically entrenched inequalities in this world should be the target of discussion. It is not coincidental that the countries usually designated as endemically poor also share a history of profound repeat abuse – slavery, colonialism, and now corporate imperialism. For societies where poverty is endemic, you find a history of colonialism, disease, corporate exploitation, ethnic clashes, dictatorships, and environmental degradation. Poverty therefore is the product of all these entrenched inequalities that we never debate. Poverty has nothing to do with what we invest our time, money, and resources on such as MDGs or SDGs.

We must often revise the nearly prophetic works by Nina Munk, Dambisa Moyo and many other thinkers before and after them who have countered dominant discourses about global anti-poverty strategies. They called upon the world to recognize the inherent historical factors that subverts real development, address structural bottlenecks - unfair global trading rules, and the destructive economic policies such as structural adjustment that have further underdeveloped states in the southern hemisphere. Structural adjustment policies are never going to eliminate poverty, but produce it!

End.