One day, a camel and her baby were chatting and the baby asked why they had humps, rounded hooves and long eyelashes, to which the mother replied.
The baby camel thought for a while and said, “So we have humps to store water, rounded hooves to keep us comfortable when we walk in the desert sand, and long eyelashes to protect our eyes from sand and dust. Then what are we doing in a zoo?”
Many times, we forget to put our strengths, skills and knowledge in the right place, thus, missing their benefits. This is true for individuals as well as institutions such as a country.
Last Friday, President William Ruto directed some ministries to allocate 30 per cent of their vacancies to National Youth Service servicemen and women. This move is aimed at encouraging and motivating many young Kenyans to join their path to national service and productivity.
Speaking in Gilgil, Nakuru county, on Friday during the NYS recruits passing out parade, President Ruto praised the role played by the sector in nurturing talent among the youth.
Some of the ministries that will have to absorb NYS graduates are Defence, Environment, Climate Change and Forestry, Tourism, Wildlife and Heritage, and Interior and National Administration.
This plan coupled with the directive to double the intake at NYS is critical for the future of the country. It is an important step to creating employment at a time when white-collar jobs are not growing as fast as Kenyans who need jobs.
You go around the country and realise that young people have resorted to vices such as alcoholism because of the lack of employment. If this trend continues, there will be a lost generation that will be engaging in vices.
We should reactivate the plan to have the NYS take over traffic control in selected parts of the country and provide security in slum areas and in non-strategic government installations.
This will leave other security agencies such as the police to concentrate on dealing with insecurity, which has been dogging the country.
NYS can also have a security firm where Kenyans can hire NYS guards to protect them making them the alternative to militia groups and vigilantes. This is one of the many ways that we can deal with unemployment and have a community that is economically empowered.
And so just like we dedicate a lot of resources to handling other issues such as insecurity, Kenya must make a deliberate attempt to make NYS one of the ways of dealing with unemployment.
We will have solved half of the issues facing the country such as insecurity, poverty and drug and substance abuse if we handle unemployment among the youth.
The danger of having a large non-working population is that the country may experience rising crime rates that will eventually result in higher insecurity rates. NYS can be one of those deliberate measures that will boost job creation. Otherwise, we are looking at a potential crisis that will see the country’s future go to the dogs.
Since its revival in 2013, the NYS programme has helped the country keep young people engaged in various productive activities. This has helped ensure that many of them are not idle and in the process falling into dangerous vices such as drug abuse, alcoholism and crime.
The future of this country will only be secure if we have a generation that has the necessary productive skills and has learnt to be responsible. Keeping this generation engaged by giving it jobs in government also helps ensure that there are skilled workers for the future.
We must come up with ways of ensuring that the skills that the NYS officers learn in the institutions and those that they transfer through the cohorts’ programmes are beneficial to them and the country.
The training at NYS is as robust as it comes and can easily be equated to what is taught in other institutions of higher learning. This means that the graduates can help the country grow if they are engaged better.
