TheHILL | NEWS | March 3.
Akwa Ibom State Commissioner for Lands and Water Resources; Pastor Umo Eno has indicted his boss, Governor Udom Emmanuel for the growing unemployment in the state, insisting that the youths are hungry and something urgent must be done to remove them from the streets.
Ironically, Pastor Eno is Governor Emmanuel’s preferred aspirant for the office of governor come 2023.
However, at a consultative meeting with local government chairmen, recently, Eno berated the system in which only a few enjoy the largesse of government, while the youths wallow in penury.
He said: “I believe that this democracy can and should trickle down…If we don’t move our youths from the streets, we, the elites, will not have a place to stay…”
His comment received a lot of applause from the youths in the audience and even on social media, with many agreeing that the current system in the state was unfair to the ordinary citizens.
Eno specifically insisted that the youths in the state were hungry, urging for a change of government prioritisation to include positive youth engagements.
He said: “Our youths are hungry. What they need is not handouts. What they need is job, job and job”.
The commissioner’s observation buttressed a recent report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which rated Akwa Ibom State among states worse hit by unemployment. The other states mentioned were Imo, Rivers, Delta and Kaduna.
The NBS report had said despite being among states with the highest federal allocations and high internally generated revenue, Akwa Ibom youths were poorly catered for, hungry and highly unemployed.
While quoting the NBS, a national news platform; Premium Times, reported that while Imo State had the highest rate of unemployment in the country with 48.7 per cent, Akwa Ibom became second while Rivers State was third with 45.2 and 43.7 per cent, respectively.
Although, Akwa Ibom State government made frantic efforts to debunk the NBS report then, Umo Eno’s assertion is seen by some pundits as an indirect admission of government failure.
Interestingly, nothing shows that there will be an appreciable change if Eno succeeds Emmanuel as government business has already been shut down, while paid youths groups and government functionaries accompany him on a jamboree of arranged adoptions.
At such functions, the unemployed youths are paid to create a false sense of popularity for peanuts, thereby taking advantage of their unemployed conditions with continued handouts
