The National Directorate of Employment (NDE) has assured Nigerian youths and women of the Federal Government’s commitment to fulfill its promise to create millions of jobs for them.
The Acting Director-General (NDE) Kunle Obanya, during a media parley disclosed that NDE has put mechanisms in place to actualise the Federal Government’s plan for job creation.
“Young people are to take advantage of the available training and skills acquisition programme of the agency for free especially to be established on their own and save themselves the stress of waiting and searching for white-collar jobs that are very scarce and not easy to come by. NDE is poised to ensure that young people and women have thorough training and skill acquisition programmes. The jobs will soon pour in because the Federal Government has the determination to create jobs for them.
“We train the young people and make linkages to commercial banks although is difficult, we are exploring ways to source funds from donors; we are sourcing funds whether locally or internationally to enable us cover the mileage of service delivery.
The other aspect is legislative intervention at the National Assembly in terms of structuring or establishing a National Employment Endowment Fund, (NEEF) such that we can tap into this fund. We can create it by levies, custom duties, tariffs, and some other taxes that will aggregate to fund the employment programmes of the NDE.
He stated further that, “With that fund, we can start empowerment of young people and women. So, those are some of the strategies we have put in place.”
He explained that the directorate has not been up and doing because of hijacking of funds by some programmes introduced by the Jonathan-led administration meant for the agency to train and impact skills into Nigerians through its programmes.