Sowunmi, who is also the Director of communication, Atiku Presidential Campaign Organisation, stated this recently in Abuja.
He submitted that successive administrations failed to tame the unemployment conundrum because they were fixated on applying same orthodox solutions over the years.
His words: “The business of job creation is better done by someone who has been in the business of job creation for many decades.
Anyone who is serious about job creation must liberalize the job ecosystem by allowing the private sector play more major roles.
This does not mean selling Nigeria’s assets, it means one is expanding the space so that everybody can be competitive and we have seen how that played out in the information communication technology sector.
The claim that Nigerian graduates are not employable is not totally true.
What is needed is for a government that is innovative to create the enabling environment for sectors and companies that can use the existing skills to thrive.”
Sowunmi argued that some of the reasons surrounding job creation initiatives in Nigeria is because often time than not, those who are providing the enabling environment and formulate the policies for jobs to be created have no real experience as job creators themselves.
“That is the unique advantage of Atiku Abubakar. As a serial entrepreneur, he has about 60,000 people working directly in his enterprises and another 250,000 indirectly employed by his companies. He has created jobs across the manufacturing sector, creative industry, communication, logistics, and education and in almost the entire job creating noodles in the country.
Therefore, unexpectedly even without him thinking, he knows what a potential investor is looking for to grow his business,” he explained.
He insisted that the former Vice President has developed an onus for spotting opportunities where others see challenges, saying Atiku understands that Nigeria is sitting on a time bomb because of the huge youth population that are jobless and are therefore open to criminality tendencies.
Sowunmi stated: “He (Atiku) thinks that right now, one of the things that Nigeria must do to join countries like Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia is to figure out how to get Nigerians to be job creators because the enabling environment is there and that government should be making life easy for them by stimulating the small scale enterprises to grow by offering them tax reliefs and get banks to support businesses who may not be profitable immediately but have the potential to do well in the near future.
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