23rd April, 2013
After spending five days in captivity, the Chairman of Ejigbo Local Council Development Authority, Mr. Kehinde Bamigbetan, finally regained his freedom on Saturday night.
In his interaction with reporters who thronged his residence to interview him on his ordeal, Bamigbetan, among others, revealed that his abductors gave him a message to deliver to governments at all levels.
The message is that youths in the country were fed up with the massive unemployment in the country and something should be done urgently to address it.
The Ejigbo LCDA council boss revealed that his abductors were engineering graduates and that they spoke flawless English. His abductors, he disclosed, told him that they were fed up with the unemployment situation in the country and that they had to do something to assist themselves.
According to Bamigbetan, the kidnappers said they took to kidnapping after searching for elusive jobs for many years without success. One of them (kidnappers) said all they kept hearing and reading from the mass media are reports of billions of naira being voted in the budget for development but with no visible job creation. The kidnappers told their blindfolded captive that they were ready to assist themselves as we approach 2015 with their rifles.
We had in the past written about the massive and intolerable level of unemployment in the country. We had advised the government to quickly find solution to the unemployment scourge affecting the country. In our editorial, we described the massive unemployment in the country, especially among graduates as a time bomb waiting to explode and that the sooner we find solution to it the better for all of us.
Now we are beginning to experience the symptoms of our inability to tackle this malaise that is threatening to consume all of us and turn our country into another Somalia. Some of our desperate youths have now taken to kidnapping to survive.
To these frustrated youths, kidnapping is more lucrative than armed robbery and the attendant risks involved.
Kidnapping is now thriving in most states of the federation that it now features daily in our newspaper reports.
It is our opinion that the time is ripe for the government to do something quickly about the unemployment situation in the country. We believe that the situation is getting out of hand. It is the kidnapping of a local government chairman that we are all talking about today, who knows whose turn it is tomorrow. We implore the government to declare emergency in the unemployment market and find solution to it. As our own contribution towards addressing the malaise, we call on the government to set up a welfare scheme for every unemployed citizen. The scheme should be administered by an agency of the government properly set up for that purpose.
The government should also create massive job generation ventures, especially in agriculture, textile and other industries to engage the millions of unemployed youths languishing in abject poverty across the country.