The Scope: Education & Unemployment

The Scope: Education & Unemployment:   “streetology” is an urban slang used by the youth to refer to job hunting, hustling, moving from door to door, emailing your curriculum ...

Education & Unemployment

 “streetology” is an urban slang used by the youth to refer to job hunting, hustling, moving from door to door, emailing your curriculum vitae to various job openings, making endless photocopies and passport photos that are never returned when you do not get the job. And then you realise that looking for a job is also a full time job. Unemployment according to international labour organisation (I L O) 1982 (resolution) is a situation where a person is without work though he/she is available for work or actively seeking for a job. Job hunting becomes a marriage of complications often associated in most developing countries, in finding that job searching is not often based on merit but maybe whom you know in the company to push your CV or how much you are willing to part with before being granted the job or if you are willing to spread your pretty legs for some horny administrator taking advantage of the jobseekers hustle.

Makerere University produces thousands of graduants every year

 Months ago in Kampala a group of grandaunts had a protest over the unemployment issues fully dressed to kill in their graduation gowns but they ended up being detained for demonstrating without permission. They were under some sort of "Unemployed Graduates Movement" a pressure group agitating for job opportunities and reforms in the employment sector. The group were on their march to "The ministry of Gender and Social Development "to express their discontent. Most youth are held back from jobs due to lack of hands on experience. To wake up and realise it wasn’t a nightmare but reality and cannot find the ability to start begging the government for help. But instead start running miles away from everybody who attended your graduation party mostly if still on the street 3years past your party. Should we question our Ugandan education system that draws us more to jobseekers for white collar jobs instead of job creators or as educate us more with practical courses that blend us easily with the labour market, Or should we begin to question what we really learn from school? For with school you learn then do tests while with LIFE you find the tests then learn. Would it have been better for our parents to send us to school to learn the basics, make a few friends and then mould us into developmental super kids so independent fashioned to create strategic designs towards service delivery from a much tender age, instead of investing so much hard earned money in educational institutions? Or are we at a point of staging out our own crucifixion like Man-Man a character from MIGUEL STREET a novel by V.S NAIPAUL who spent the whole day writing a single word. For example when he spent the whole day writing "SCHOOL" around the block he never got past "O" but simply repeated "O" over and over and over again. So imagine we join him in writing "O" over and over again until our children are done with education, with decent qualifications and jobs. Then measure the social content that lives most unemployed with the lucky few finding potential in anything that can make them earn a living. This lingers a danger of majority of unemployed Ugandans around the clusters of poverty and fear of failure.