By Moses Michira
NAIROBI, KENYA: Meet Michael Oduor, 28, a water seller making Sh300 a day. He lives in Nairobi’s Mathare North slum, one of Kenya’s poorest and most dangerous settlements. Michael is armed with his strong arms and a sociology degree from Maseno University.
He is emblematic of Kenya’s unemployment crisis, the ticking time bomb factory churning out 60,000 university graduates annually, turning into an unforgiving labour market that has reached saturation point. Even worse, 10 million Kenyans have no work. That is a scary statistic.
For three years since graduating, Oduor has swam in the depths of frustration, struggling to find work to support his family – a wife and a son.
Expanding workforce
“My ultimate goal is to pull my family from this neighbourhood,” he says. “It’s not a safe place to raise a family. Armed robbery is ordinary, and dozens of my childhood friends have been killed as criminals.” Oduor is the poster boy of Kenya’s frustrated unemployed youth who have endured nothing but broken promises. Having a university degree is no longer a sure ticket to a secure job and riches. The Jubilee Government won the elections riding on the crest of a wave of frustrated and hopeful youth. Now, their biggest nightmare over the next five years is how to deliver to a generation that has lost hope.
Since last year, Michael has been selling water from a local community tank to feed his family. But his story bleeds across the entire labour market, where thousands of unemployed youth are unable to find formal employment. It is a story that is being replicated with tens of thousands of young Kenyans, still jobless despite having a college education that once guaranteed a formal job.
According to the World Bank, in Kenya this year, only three in 10 adults under the age of 34 have any job at all, translating to 70 per cent unemployment. When it comes to an actual salary, just 125,000 youth hold formal jobs – within a population of 41 million. It is a sum that amounts to a lost generation, on the backs of failed Government policies in generating employment and dealing with a rapidly exploding population in the 1980s and 1990s that spawned a record number of new college graduates.
It is estimated the Kenyan work force is now expanding by nearly a million people a year, while the economy is only able to create about 660,000 jobs, of which 90 per cent are in the informal sector, including farming and small enterprises, the 2013 Economic Survey reported. It is a wastage rate that is driving unemployment ever higher, to now a majority of all Kenyan adults.
The unemployment problem is bigger than just longer job queues. For Mr Oduor, his biggest fear is this; which of his friends will be killed next? In places like Mathare, some turn to a life of crime and are cut down, others are innocent victims of insecurity and others still fall victim to reckless police. “I have accepted my situation, unlike most of the youth, who have chosen crime,” he says. “Most young men take comfort in the knowledge that they have children growing up somewhere (and begin to live dangerously).” He terms a ‘hustler’s mentality’. Violent robberies and muggings are the most common crimes in Mathare, he says. The statics linking youth to crime are even more worrying. Unemployed youth now account for more than half of the crimes reported nationally, official data from the police shows. The most recent data available are old but confirm the shocking trend. In 2008, of the 89,770 crimes reported, some 48,710, or 54 per cent, were committed by youth aged 16 to 25.
Five years
Unemployed youth will maim or kill for even the least valuable. Take for instance, Oduor says, a recent shooting in the nearby Kiamaiko slums. ”A young man robbed a newly-posted colleague of a mobile phone. Such killings are normal,” he reveals. In the afternoons, dozens of young men hang around his workplace, some three water points within the slum, where they gamble with playing cards and chew on muguka (khat) leaves. The gambling is a means to earn money to buy little luxuries like muguka and cheap liquor.
A home outside the slum and an office job are part of the life he expected on graduating. His last, and only, job was as a teacher in a privately owned secondary school along Kangundo Road on an Sh11,000 monthly salary, until he quit to start his own primary school in the slums. His own school collapsed soon after it opened because parents were unwilling to pay the Sh300 a month in fees, even when a donor offered to provide the children with free lunches.
Kenya now produces some 60,000 graduates a year. But any entry-level job typically attracts 300 to 700 applications, says Perminus Wainaina, managing director of Nairobi-based recruitment firm Corporate Staffing Services. “The chance of a graduate landing a job is pretty slim owing to competition for the same opening,” said Mr Wainaina. It gets worse for other graduates. “It takes the average college graduate five years to secure a job,” says Dr Jacob Omolo, an economics professor at Kenyatta University. Simeon Abuga, 30, graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce from Kenyatta University in 2009. He has been unable to secure employment despite qualifying as a certified public accountant. “I am very frustrated and tired on the job hunt,” he says.
It gets worse for college graduates with diploma and certificate qualifications.
For Bonny Kiwiri, it has been three long months since he got into his new trade; hawking boiled eggs and sausages, despite attaining a diploma in Sociology from the Kenya Institute of Social Studies, Machakos, in 2010. His chase after a formal job that might earn him a monthly salary of over Sh30,000 has taken him to dozens of offices, every single embassy and foreign mission in Nairobi, but he has never reached interview stage. Yet, he clings on to hope of landing a job soon.
Other graduates are less optimistic. Geoffrey Ondieki, a Form Four graduate came to the city in June 2011 on the invitation of a friend, a security guard, to come and find a similar position, rather than stay in his rural home in Kisii.
It has been a torturous journey. It was not until the end of last year that he managed to get a sales position selling milk on a bicycle. He works from 5am and dreams of a watchman’s job instead. His ritual, each day after finishing work at 10am, is to visit a jobs notice board outside the Odeon Cinema along Nairobi’s Tom Mboya Street, in the hope of finding a vacancy as a gardener or a guard. “I want any job. I can’t afford to choose, but I know I can’t get an office job.”
It is the voice of two-thirds of his generation, locked out and dying, in a nation where jobs are the luxury that very few ever attain.
