Today, nobody is ready to talk about unemployment which is affecting nearly 75 per cent of the Kenyan youth mostly graduates.
It is predominantly triggered by the scarcity of job opportunities in our country.
The jobs available are offered to unqualified people from rich families.
The competent, skilled and desperate youths who deserve these positions have no alternatives but to keep submitting their CVs and to tarmac without hope.
Whenever a job vacancy is advertised, thousands of educated yet unemployed youth queue with their envelopes full of prerequisites that should merit them to secure the job.
However, the ones responsible for recruiting and scrutinising them, already know the candidate who has gotten the job before the job interviews.
Youths go through a lot and choose to harbour it to themselves.
The youth sink into depression because the pressure to get a job is high.
Victims’ dignity and self-esteem are weakened and withdrawn to an extent of making them aberrant.
Others become cons and dupers in the streets as a means of survival.
Some people also land in toxic jobs.
Those who are lucky to get jobs do not motivate the jobless but call them names.
We consider it a phase that most youths fail to cope with.
It hurts to wake up very unmotivated, with no job and no food.
You choose to borrow a loan from mobile loan apps as capital for business inventions.
The high taxes imposed and threats from the county askaris make them opt out.
Before you give up, you try investing in gambling and that’s how you lose their money completely.
After all these, they end up abusing drugs as a remedy to their trauma and stress.
We pray that the current government will intervene and create job opportunities for the youths.
For the unemployed, there is still light at the end of the tunnel.
Do not give up.
Student at Moi University
Edited by Kiilu Damaris
