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Walking the job-creation talk not one of Uganda’s motor skills

Monday November 28 2016

I have been thinking investment and jobs of late. Not that I have any money to invest or the wherewithal to create jobs. I trained to be a jobseeker myself, even though the governments that were in power in Uganda in my youth often went on about wanting to produce job creators. It was mere talk.

One still hears the same claims being made today. Meanwhile, what to do to create jobs for the multitudes of unemployed and restless youth remains one of the biggest questions of the day, especially as many of the said young people are graduates who exit universities with abundant hopes of making it in the wide world out there.

A leading daily recently had a photo of hundreds of young people lining up to hand in their CVs at a government entity that had advertised only a handful of openings.

Such is the level of redundancy among young people that, apparently, even when it is the military advertising openings, thousands now turn up to compete for the few dozen vacancies.

This in a country where, in years gone by, the army considered itself lucky if it managed to recruit a handful of young people in certain regions.

And even then, those who volunteered were never among the best such regions had to offer. For the most part, the best did not consider soldiering to be worth the candle, as it were. That is now history. Good news for the army, one would say, but possibly not for those who join as mere jobseekers rather than because they are soldiers at heart.

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And amid all this, the government continues to talk about the imperative to train young people to become job creators.

It would have all made sense if there was a coherent policy on the matter and a coherent implementable strategy comprising training facility development and clear links between training, internship, assistance with self-establishment and, where applicable, production for local and export markets.

This is not rocket science.

On the government side, those who are supposed to get these things to happen know what to do.

Except that they do not always do what they are supposed to do, for simple and complex reasons connected to, among other things, lack of funding, co-ordination and accountability.

Consider this. Recently, a government official revealed the names of would-be vocational training schools that were built but failed to take off because there were no students.

One is in Nakaseke district in the Luweero Triangle, where President Yoweri Museveni goes on regular poverty reduction tours.

So there we are: The government wants to produce job creators but seems to have little idea how to rally potential beneficiaries to go for the necessary training.

It would not be alarming if this were the only complication.

Also fairly recently, an opposition politician, one of very few whose aspirations stretch beyond the singular objective of winning power and becoming president and who has taken the trouble to visit some vocational schools, revealed how those he went to have not carried out a serious upgrade of equipment for years, some since the 1960s. Those that were built by foreign governments are, it would seem, waiting for the same governments to come back and upgrade them.

One outcome of the neglect has been that a good number of the would-be job creators they release into society every now and then are hardly able to do the things they claim to have studied.

This is not hearsay. A young friend whose older sister works at one such school, one of the better known and oldest, and an acquaintance, a job creator in the artisanal metal-craft world, have real-life stories about it.

The young friend’s sister convinced him to hire some of her employer’s products to help with building his house.

It would be cheap to hire them, she said.

Cheap they were, but what they produced left him, a social scientist with no in-depth knowledge about construction, speechless.

He eventually hired someone else, a middle-aged man who had learnt his craft from his father and has never been to a vocational school, to redo the work.

The metal craftsman had more or less similar stories of youngsters who had “graduated” from formal vocational training messing up customers’ orders before he took them through their paces over several weeks of apprenticeship that entailed pretty much starting again from scratch.

At the time I heard these stories, I had heard a few others from foreign investors who lamented the lack of skills and a certain attitudinal problem whereby youngsters looking for work seemed to be more interested in their pay packages than what they would have been hired to do.

How does one fix this? A few days ago I met an investor from the Horn of Africa.

He operates in the area of “value addition” and can make virtually anything from wood. He, too, has issues with lack of skills.

And he had a solution in mind: Import skilled artisans to train his Ugandan employees for two years. Except work permits cost too much and take too long to get.
So? He’s planning to relocate to a neighbouring country. Meanwhile, the job creation talk carries on.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]

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