Chris Ngige
Minister of Labour and Employment, Chris Ngige, has advised
Nigerians to carpentry, plumbing, and not focus only on white collar
jobs.
Ngige believes Nigeria’s high unemployment rate can be greatly
reduced if more Nigerians embrace blue collar jobs that are largely
neglected.
He made this known during an interview on Channels TV’s Sunrise Daily on Wednesday, April 24, 2019.
The Minister noted that the Federal Government has an established
vocational skills policy, but that Nigerians think blue collar jobs are
beneath their status. He said;
“It (unemployment) was an issue and that was why we did an
advocacy and told people not to look at only the white collar jobs.
There are blue collar jobs. Skills. You have to train your hands. You
have to do plumbing, carpentry, tailoring.
“We had to do the vocational skills policy. The NDE (National
Directorate of Employment), one of my parastatals, has at least three or
four vocational skills programmes.
“We have our specialist skills centres in Lagos, Ibadan, Kaduna, Bauchi, Calabar, Warri, Enugu, and all over the federation.
“We now have many in collaboration with the state governments.
We send them people to train them. And people come in there as
apprentice and after we finish with them, we empower them.
“But the problem is that, how many people are ready to come there and train?
“They regard those jobs as jobs that don’t befit people’s
status, but it’s not true. We’re counselling people that going to do
these jobs doesn’t make you an inferior person.
“But here, everybody wants a (white) collar job. They want to
stay in air-conditioned office. They want to work in the bank or oil
companies and nothing less than that.”
