A few days after announcing that the N5000 stipend for unemployed youth will be paid, the Federal Government has said plans are in top gear to register all unemployed citizens across Nigeria.
The decision follows the uproar that greeted the seemingly slow pace of the All Progressives Congress (APC)-led government to fulfill its campaign promise of paying unemployed graduates N5,000 as social security stipend.
The acting Director General of the National Directorate of Employment (NDE), Mr. Olakunle Obayan, stated this during the official handover by the former Director General, Alhaji Abubakar Mohammed.
Speaking on the current template to address the challenges of unemployment in the country, Obayan said: “Actually some of them (projects) are brand new and they are coming up in 2016. We are going to tenaciously pursue the employment generation activities of NDE, and we are going to expand their scope.
“This new schemes when they come on board, are schemes such that they are going to take care of the social security issues and something that will need majority of the people to get something doing.”
We are going to pursue that vigorously, we are going to start a national registration of the unemployed. That we are going to take on fully so that we will have a great idea of how many of them are around.” Obayan stated: “We have some but we are going to improve on the information we have in our data base and we are going to make sure that it is something we can access from our different locations, even if you are down in the hinterland, you should be able to do so.
Mohammed who retires from public office after 26 years, explained that NDE has diversified into various areas in the training and mentoring of Nigerians not just for acquiring jobs but also for creating employment opportunities for other Nigerians.
