The Nigeria Diaspora Network (NDN) has urged the Federal Government to provide soft loans and agricultural inputs to youths.
The Financial Director of NDN, Mr Samuel Iyapo, made the call in a statement in Abuja.
He attributed one of the reasons of unemployment among the young people to urban migration.
According to him, everybody moves to the cities looking for white collar jobs and because the cities cannot cope with the number of people migrating, there will be population explosion in the urban centers.
“To reverse this trend, I will suggest a restructuring of the economy by giving local government areas autonomy to enable them generate more revenues and create jobs.
“The councils in return should engage the youth by introducing school-to-land programmes,” he said.
Iyapo said though the President Muhammadu Buhari-led government was making effort in diversifying the economy, the government should do more in giving a monitored loan.
“Monitored loan in the sense that such loan will be directed to the purpose for which the loan is given. “Economy should be diversified from over reliance on the oil sector to agriculture. “There should be programmes by local governments allocating lands for use and supply of high yielding crops.
“The government also should make available free rentals of tractors and other farming tools to assist the young farmers,” he said. He said everybody should be blamed for the challenge the nation was faced with.
“There are enough blame to go around. We all, as citizens, have faults and can not exonerate ourselves from the problem. “We all encourage corruption one way or the other.
“The people’s reactions to prosecuting corrupt officials have been mangle; it is very difficult to prosecute a corrupt Yoruba man because of the response from his people who would think he or she is being prosecuted because he is a Yoruba man.
“The same goes to Igbos and Hausa/Fulani. We are all guilty of this,” he said.
(NAN)
