At a small shoes stall near the Khoja bus station in Nairobi, 26-year-old Martin Christopher replays one of US President Barack Obama’s speeches on his mobile phone.
The speech was recorded at Kasarani stadium during Obama’s brief tour of the capital late last month, and Martin somehow managed to download it into his smartphone.
In the speech, Obama talks of Kenya’s economic potential and how the country’s youth have a great opportunity to usher the nation into the big league. Martin, in between dusting the tens of shoes on the shelves of his small stall, listens keenly, cutting the image of an attentive congregant in church.
As he holds the smartphone near his ear, he tells a friend who has come visiting that it is interesting that “a big, powerful country” like the US can recognise the efforts of a “small, struggling” nation like Kenya.
“Kenya tunakuwaga mbele,” (Kenya is ever ahead of the pack) he informs his friend as the two converse in Sheng, the preferred lingo in these parts of the city where the “hustler culture” is the dominant economic force.
Somehow, their small banter about Kenya’s geo-economic prowess digresses into Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero and the grass his team planted just hours ahead of Obama’s visit, and as the two convulse in fits of laughter over the missed opportunity to impress, a man silently approaches the stall and pulls Martin into the busy street.
In the din of downtown Nairobi, it is hard to hear what the man wants from Martin, who seems agitated as he talks to the stranger. He keeps flailing his hands, and as the minutes tick by, his demeanour and facial expressions change for the worse.
And then, just as quietly as he had come, the man melts into the Nairobi crowd. Martin makes the short-long journey into his stall. He is a deflated man, and Obama’s speech is no longer worth his ear.
The man was a City Council askari, he announces, not in the exact words, but by a simple noun: Kanjo. We all know what that means, but we still look at him with expectant eyes, waiting for him to go on.
The man wanted Sh1,000 for him to let Martin run his “illegal business” for the day, Martin says. He could not raise the amount, hence the argument.
The askari, however, would be back later in the day for his loot, and so Martin has to sell at least three pairs of shoes as fast as possible and hand over the money to the extortionist.
“I just hope no other Kanjo will come today,” he says.
“But one of them has already come,” we ask him.
“It doesn’t matter, they all want their share of the money.”
“Yes, seriously. They will arrest and charge me for hawking, and then I will be forced to pay even more in court fines.”
We get out of the stall, but promise we would be back to see how it turned out. A week later, we return, only to find a stranger manning Martin’s stall. He tells us that Martin sold off the stall, and that he won’t be coming today.
We call Martin to ask what happened, and he tells us, again in Sheng, that “doo ya stock za ndula iliisha, na pia sina ya kupatia hao wasee wakija hapa, so wacha nirudi Jobless Corner nione kama nitaget hustle ingine”.
(I have run out of money for new stock and I do not have money to give the askaris when they come, so let me go back to the Jobless Corner and figure out what to do next).
Martin is now jobless, and as the world marks the International Youth Day today, he has joined the ranks of the millions of other Kenyan youth aged between 16 and 34 who are unemployed.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) is worried by the plight of the likes of Martin, and for the planners and forecasters there, the danger could be worth much more than the Sh1,000 the askaris collect from the small business people of Nairobi daily.
Early this year, the ILO warned that the grim job market outlook could lead to more terrorism, robberies, social unrest and political upheavals in the next decade should Africa fail to diffuse the ticking time bomb.
That is worrying, because Africa, a 2014 Population Reference Bureau report indicates, has the fastest growing population in the world.
Despite the rhetoric from government functionaries on Kenya’s economic growth, a big portion of the nation’s youth have very little to celebrate about.
Hosting the recent Global Entrepreneurship Summit might have given more impetus to such labels as Nairobi being the continent’s “Silicon Savannah” and “a hotbed” of technology, health care, banking, and insurance, but Martin does not understand what the buzz regarding hosting the GES was all about.
Yet the experiences of Middle Eastern and North African economies have shown that there is a direct link between youth unemployment and a country’s general social and political wellbeing.
When young people are damned to desperation, they become agents of social unrest, abuse drugs, join extremist groups and fuel insecurity in their communities.
While data is readily available about youth unemployment in Kenya, it is the individual stories, such as Martin’s, that prove there is a much bigger problem than the numbers show, and that this will need more than the government’s intervention to solve.
Attendees of a forum organised by publishers Storymoja in May this year at Alliance Francaise, Nairobi sought to solve that problem, and they ended up pointing accusatory fingers at Kenya’ education system.
In the audience were curriculum developers, psychologists, employers, economists, teachers and parents, and the panelists noted that the rigid, idealistic education system that ignored learners’ gifts and talents ended up contributing to the high number of young people NEET (not in education, employment or training).
Muthoni Garland, author and founder of Storymoja, said: “It is heartbreaking even to a parent that you invest so much money on a child’s higher education only to find them standing on the streets with their academic testimonials in their hands with no job. Young people work so hard, training for so long only to realise their good grades and papers are not good enough for them to get and keep a job… it is a recipe for disaster.”
The argument that more knowledge will equal more jobs is a myth, the forum heard, because young people’s skills do not match the demands of the market.
Interestingly, the observation about this mismatch had been recorded in a report prepared by the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) last year. The report, presented during a ministerial conference in Cote d’Ivoire, lists, among many other challenges, the “few available employment opportunities against a fast-growing pool of employment seekers” as a major concern for Kenya’s labour services.
While the Kenya Universities and Colleges’ Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) — the body charged with admitting students to public tertiary institutions — recorded that 443,783 joined public universities last year (more than double the 195,528 that joined in 2012), Mr Perminus Wainaina, a human resource management expert, says a growing skills deficiency in young graduates is forcing many employers to spend a lot of money training the fresh graduates they hire.
Other employers, he says, opt to give the available opportunities to their own junior staff who are acquainted with the organisation, and so will require lesser time and resources to train until they are “fit for the job”.
In the forum at Alliance Francaise in May, Storymoja also launched a career encyclopedia, a two-volume book that contains information about career opportunities in Kenya, the average salaries of those employed in those fields, and the most promising professional organisations.
The encyclopedia also contains profiles of successful people in frowned-upon careers such as hairdressing and plumbing, some of whom earn ten times the annual salaries of those in white-collar jobs.
Peculiarly, KUCCPS reports, only 11,523 candidates applied to join the 50 middle-level colleges in Kenya this year, where training for such blue-collar jobs is offered. The colleges have a capacity of 41,550.
Probably riding on the potential of blue-collar jobs, a group of young women professionals has started an outreach programme that encourages young people to think beyond the glitzy, air-conditioned corner office.
Daughters of Nile, or just DON, is a group of 19 young women from diverse professional backgrounds — including law, the media, accounting and teaching — who visit secondary schools and technical colleges to encourage students to venture into other “unexploited careers”.
From monthly contributions, the group also targets women in cottage industries in the lake basin, assisting them to formalise their businesses, do better book-keeping and market their wares.
The group’s organising secretary, Sandra Ruong’o, told DN2 they were concerned by the lack of labour awareness in the region and the lackluster way in which the government was approaching the issue, and so they decided “to start with the little we had” in the hope that “the local leadership would augment our efforts”.
Hundreds of kilometres away in Nairobi’s Mathare slums, two 20-year-olds, Joseph Mwangi and Dominic Senerwa, use half of their Sh6,000 individual monthly income to organise the training of young boys and girls in the slum.
Every evening, under the glare of Philips floodlights, more than 250 children who are part of the duo’s Sejo Rooney Club gather to play football, rehearse drama lines and train in acrobatics
“If we can get them to spend more time in school and more time in the field, they will have no room for drugs,” explains Mwangi. “We also infuse talks on the benefits of education and hard work into the games.”
These two youth groups hope to change their little communities one child, one young person, at a time, but their efforts run the risk of being swallowed by the bigger national monster that keeps pushing candidates their way.
There is also a disconnect between government efforts to help the youth, and the priority needs on the ground.
For instance, the Youth Enterprise Development Fund (YEDF), introduced on December 8, 2006 and later graduated into a State corporation on May 11, 2007, is yet to make a meaningful difference in the lives of many young people, especially in the country’s informal settlements and rural areas.
According to a report on the fund, in 2011 YEDF engaged in partnership with 32 Financial Intermediaries (FIs) to enable the youth access funds directly, either as individuals or as organised entities.
Hundreds of youth groups have since drawn funds from the organisation, but the effects of those loans on unemployment are quite small.
Baseline surveys indicate that not many youth are aware of the existence of the Fund, leave alone its goals. Those who do claim that the process of acquiring a loan is so laborious and riddled with bureaucracy that many youth organisations give up mid-way.
Martin, the jobless young man at the start of this story, is one such person. This week he will be again knocking on doors and dropping job application letters, and his colleague at Khoja will be busy ducking an extortionist City Council brigade that has refused to allow his small business toddle the first steps to breaking even.
And that is the plight of Kenya’s youth, both educated and uneducated, today
The government has done much to address the youth unemployment problem in the country. While the Youth Enterprise Development Fund is yet to bear huge results and take the nation’s youth off the streets into small startups, the National Youth Service is being touted as the next best answer to the joblessness problem.
Already, the government has increased its spending on the NYS programme, and while some leaders see this is a good investment in the nation’s young population, others argue the additional money should have been pumped into other youth-enrichment avenues.
For instance, economist David Ndii, writing in the Saturday Nation, critiques the National Youth Service thus: “The NYS budget has been scaled up from Sh13 billion to a whopping Sh25 billion.
This is lunacy. There is no organisation, other than a military going to war, that can effectively double its budget absorption capacity from one year to the next. If there is one thing I am certain CS Anne Waiguru knows very well, it is the corruption risk that such a budget escalation entails. Power corrupts. But even if the money could be absorbed, is this how we should be spending it?
What is the opportunity cost? Our primary school teacher-to-student ratio is approaching 1:60 — one of the highest in the world — against a recommended maximum of 1:40. Sh25 billion is enough to pay 100,000 primary school teachers for a year, which is more than we need to bring the ratio back to 1:40. We don’t have anywhere near enough health workers either.
Would these young people we are militarising not be more useful to society and themselves as teachers and health workers? Sh5 billion would be sufficient to set up a loan scheme to send an additional 100,000 young people to tertiary colleges instead of boot camp over the next five years. Incidentally, the Higher Education Loans Board budget request of Sh9 billion was cut to Sh4.9 billion. Reason? Lack of funds.”
