Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him (and his family) for a lifetime. This adaptation of a popular Chinese adage best captures the essence of job creation as a policy tool and explains why it is pivotal to government policy making worldwide. Indeed, most modern countries measure the health of their economy through close and constant monitoring of three key indices; inflation, interest and unemployment (being the rate at which jobs are being lost).This latter index ' the rate of unemployment ' is based on the Friedman macroeconomic term of planning for full employment, whereby all (or nearly all) employable people can have a job at the prevailing level of wages in the country. Little wonder then that job creation ranks high amongst the core objectives of President Jonathan's Transformation Agenda for Nigeria. But why then the difficulty in creating these jobs that will put Nigeria nearer the paradise of full employment'A job is an occupation for which you are paid a salary. A self-sustaining job is one that also generates enough revenue to pay for the service of the person employed. In short, the self-sustaining job creates wealth by adding value to the employer or host economy. Thus, in a typical village, a job as a traffic warden, no matter how useful, does not directly add value to the economy and the salary of the warden is paid by taxing citizens. On the other hand, the price paid for the food a farmer grows is the 'salary' for the services rendered by his family while working on the farm. The farmer thus adds value to the host community and he does not need to rely on tax or other government money to get paid.To make matters worse for the traffic warden, his salary is determined by fiat. The Minimum Wage Law which, given its universal application across all forms of employment, does not take into account the productivity of the employee. Consequently, as the salary the farmer receives is determined by market forces (demand and supply for the food he grows), the more productive farmer will get a higher income and he will be encouraged to be more productive by growing more food. But as our traffic warden gets paid regardless his productivity, he will remain perpetually lazy and his job can only last for as long as government has surplus money to pay his salary.Trapped by a poorly thought out Minimum Wage Law that increased minimum wages to N18,000 without deference to productivity thereby limiting government's ability to create salaried employment, World Bank wonderkind, Mrs Ngozi okonjo Iweala and her economic team must look to Small and Medium-scale Enterprises (SMEs) if they are to successfully prosecute government's job creation agenda. Especially at those SMEs that that will add value to the host economy by processing locally available raw materials, before sending them out of the host community. Kaolin for the pharmaceutical industry, Limestone for cement making, Gravel for road works etc.But, in a country like Nigeria with its confluence of different cultures and its rainbow coalition of conflicting interests, promoting these SMEs comes with its own set of problems. These problems are further compounded by the World Trade Organization and its globalisation rules, which open the Nigerian market up to all comers. This of course makes it easy for multinationals, with their home government's support and large scale manufacturing technology to overwhelm their Nigerian counterparts. Moreso, as the failure of the Nigerian government to provide functional infrastructure and employment generating subsidies puts Nigerian industrialists at a distinct disadvantage. Consequently, when Nigerians in Nigeria buy Made-in-China USA of Europe goods, we are simply exporting Nigerian jobs to China, USA and Europe. In so doing, we are simply sentencing the Nigerian economy to a slow, long drawn out death.Some such initiatives like the federal government's widely advertised 'YouWin' to create 50,000 jobs for Youths and 'Cassava Added Value Initiative' to provide an improved market for cassava growers, are based on well-thought out dynamics of development economics. W W Rostow's 'Stages of Economic Growth', which describes five stages for moving from a traditional society to one of mass consumption, still leaves Nigeria dawdling at stage two while we perpetually try to fulfill the Preconditions for Take-Off to economic growth.In a country where 80 per cent of the population still lives in rural communities and where 70 per cent of the economy still operates at the informal level, the way forward needs a change in the mindset of Nigerians. We have to leave the comfort zone of our traditional society and join the modern World of an organised economy. But with the Cold War over, American-style capitalism now dominates the world and we need to accept that government intervention in the economy through things like Minimum Wage by fiat or subsidizing education, etc are no longer tenable in the Nigeria that America wants for us. The days of British-style welfarism are gone for good and we need to fit into the American vision of how the world will work.
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