by Chris Seagateng,
Botswana is currently witnessing some of the worst scenarios of joblessness, especially of her productive populace of young people who come out of formal educational training without any sustainable hope of gaining credible and well-paying jobs.
For thousands of youths, finding good and satisfying jobs is as difficult as finding a needle in a hay stack thereby exposing a lot of these young persons to varying degrees of crimes even as those of them that are decent enough to turn down tempting offers from crime lords have decided to emigrate to God knows where in search of the elusive greener pastures.
There is still lack of credible measures to create sustainable environment for the thousands of youth to become employers of labor rather than jobless youth in search of the elusive white collar jobs.
With increased rate of insecurity and high crime rate all across the country the red light signals for a paradigm shift, perhaps youth unemployment needs its special stimulus package so as to create the enabling environment for willing entrepreneurs with the capital to set up genuine industries that would create job opportunities to the jobless youth. The need to search for better ways of creating credible employment opportunities for the unemployed youth idling on the streets has become the number one national security interest. There is perhaps again no other necessity that has become imperative than creating sustainable employment opportunities for the youth because of the indisputable fact that the idle mind is the devil’s workshop and as long as the productive youth cannot find credible and sustainable jobs both in the private and public sectors of the nation’s economy, they will sooner rather than later find ways of busying themselves and generate some incomes to keep body and soul together even if that means getting into conflict with the law by committing criminal activities.
Youth Unemployment is a problem that each society faces and each society must find a way to beat it. The question that however begs for an acceptable and scientifically accurate answer is whether Botswana is committed to finding solution to this hydra headed monster of unemployment? How far have we gone as a nation towards creating credible job opportunities for the thousands of jobless youth roaming the streets? Have we searched for sustainable panacea to the vicious cycle of youth unemployment in our various communities and localities? Has all relevant stakeholders done enough to create job opportunities and/or even effectively coordinated efforts aimed at creating the enabling environment for youth employment in both the private and public sector? What we need is a long term solution influenced by solid research to galvanize national effort to create credible job opportunities for the thousands of unemployed youth.
How to create credible jobs has therefore become imperative and this is precisely what Botswana Youth Jobs Fair have set out a 5 year project by the youths as the key actors in championing sustainable jobs, decent jobs, job creation and job readiness education to the young people. Our dear nation should pay attention and provide these job opportunities so that Botswana become more peaceful and productive because any nation that neglects her youth sector is doomed.
Gone are the days we would wait for things to happen before action is taken.
Botswana Youth Jobs Fair 21-23 June,Botho University
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