Over 17,000 youths are unemployed and will not be fooled again

Dear Editor,
I was tickled by the resurrected promise of the APNU/AFC, regarding the creation of jobs for the youths. After spending almost five years in office, it is abundantly clear that the APNU/AFC failed to fulfil this promise. According to the Labour Force Survey (GLFS) 2018, unemployment among youths worsened over the past four-plus years.
This report revealed that the total number of youths unemployed increased to reach 17,058 during the fourth quarter of 2017. The vast majority of unemployed youths came from rural areas. The GLFS 2018 showed that 72.6 per cent or 12,380 of the unemployed youths came from these communities. There were also more female youths who were unemployed according to the GLFS 2018; 54.2 per cent of female youths compared to 45.8 per cent of their male counterparts.
More depressing than the youth unemployment rate was the labour participation rate that captures the extent to which citizens of working age are actively seeking employment opportunities. The GFLS 2018 placed the labour participation rate at 54.5 per cent during the last quarter of 2017.
It, therefore, means that approximately 45.5 per cent or 249,307 persons of working age did not actively seek employment opportunities during that period. Two possible explanations for this depressing scenario are: (i) a large portion of our people lack ambition, or (ii) almost half the population of working age have lost hope of finding employment opportunities.
It would be responsible for assuming that option two is true since all of the critical labour-intensive sectors have contracted significantly over the past five years, thereby reducing the number of employment opportunities available.
Editor, I am sure that a large number of youths who will be voting on March 2, 2020, are not necessarily interested in the statistics presented above since they are either unemployed or have abandoned hope of finding a job. They do not need any academic lecture on unemployment to be convinced that unemployment has reached crisis proportions. I am equally convinced that the youths are more interested in the solution to this problem.
The politicians who are competing for votes of the youths during the 2020 elections are, therefore, duty-bound to provide concrete plans on how they will address the problem. In particular, they will need to convince the youths that they have plans to resuscitate the labour-intensive sectors with the gains from the oil and gas sector.
The youths know that unless the labour-intensive sectors (agriculture, mining, construction, services) are revived, employment of our youths will remain an elusive dream. The new oil and gas sector can only produce a few thousand jobs (not more than 5000) at most. In this regard, it might be useful for all the political parties, and not just the APNU/AFC to present their plans to demonstrate they can catalyse our labour-intensive sectors with the gains from oil and gas. The time for resurrecting old promises has expired. The youths are looking for practical solutions.

With regards,
S Pasha