Governments are instituted to enact policies to make life comfortable and easy for its citizenry. Successive governments especially in the Fourth Republic have failed to implement policies and programs to give the vulnerable employment opportunities. Jobs are crucial to a person’s wellbeing; they are essential not only for individuals to meet their basic needs, but also to provide them with dignity, self-confidence, hope, self-respect, status, and a means to “realize their self-potential”.
Since 1994, successive governments have failed to tackle unemployment issues especially underemployment. Underemployment can be experienced in any of the following which has become a normal phenomenon faced by most graduates especially commencing from 2009 : “involuntarily working less than full time; highly skilled workers like graduates being forced to take up low-paying jobs that require, at best, modest levels of skills; underutilization of employed workers due to overstaffing; and workers utilizing their raw labour and assisted with few complimentary inputs, especially capital, which results in low productivity and meagre earning.
It is interesting to hear successive governments boast that they have created jobs which I believe are fathom jobs. What kind of jobs have they created, the seasonal jobs with low salaries or what? Today as a country, we face high graduate unemployment with more than 72% of graduates having completed national service being unemployed within their first years with over 60% of the 28% of graduates being employed after their first service earning between GH¢400-800 which is far below the average highly skilled worker’s salary of GH¢1640. Successive governments have failed to comprehensively compile data of unemployed people as well as the vacancies of industries before implementing its policies aimed at solving unemployment.
Bad policies have always alienated industry players from the processes of formulation and implementation. Programs such as GYEEDA, SADA, YES have failed to solve the issues of unemployment bedevilling the country which has hampered the development of Ghana. Jobs cannot be seasonal and such initiatives cannot build the human capacity. A lack of understanding youth unemployment especially graduate and middle class unemployment have compounded the issues. It is interesting to know that a survey carried out by then Ministry of Manpower Development and Empowerment in 1999 has not served as a guide to successive governments to nip unemployment in the bud.
By 2000, the rate of unemployment stood at 11.2% representing 1.3 million and shamefully after one and half decades, we have not been able to solve the issue but rater the situation has escalated to a point where 48% of the youth are unemployed and an annual 250,000 youth entering the labour market have only 2% being absolved in the formal sector. In fact, policies implemented have sought to be used as vehicles to loot state resources to enrich state actors at the upper echelon. In solving this problem, governments must resit and go back to the drawing board to look at the lapses and failures of these policies.
Policies aimed at solving unemployment must be pragmatic and sustainable. Industry players must be integrated in the processes of formulating and implementing the policies; again, governments must encourage institutions to train people based on the needs of industries as well as creating an enabling environment for SMEs to travail in order to expand their businesses to employ more people.
SMEs must be critically looked at since studies in Asia and Latin America have shown that support of SMEs is the way forward for creating sustainable jobs and as a way of solving unemployment which has dire consequences on the economy.