Labour minister calls for increased budgetary allocation for employment generation

Abuja — Appearing before the Senate and House of Representatives Committee on Employment, Labour and Productivity, the Minister of Labour and Employment, Muhammad Dingyadi, called for more budgetary allocation for 2025 to enable the Ministry to scale up its performance in key areas of its mandate.

The ministry’s Head of Press and Public Relations, Patience Onuobia, said, in a statement, that the minister, who spoke before the committee in Abuja, noted that the N46 billion allocated to the ministry and its agencies in this year’s proposed budget would not allow the ministry fully attend to its proposed progranmes and projects for the year.

The minister, according to the statement, said funds allocated to the ministry would particularly go into the renovation, reconstruction and re-equipping of the ministry’s skills development centres under its parastatals in all parts of the country, adding that this would generating employment.

The statement quoted the minister as saying: “One of the key priorities of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda is job creation, which falls under the Ministry of Labour and Employment. For us to achieve this noble objective, we need special funds to renovate, reconstruct, and re-equip the skills development centres under the ministry and its agencies across the country.

“We are aware that many of the infrastructural projects in this year’s budget can be used to create jobs for our teeming youths. However, over 60% of such jobs are unskilled jobs that are not sustainable. Once the project is completed, many of them will go back to becoming unemployed.”

He added: “The best solution to unemployment is the creation of skilled jobs with starter packs, where trainees will set up their own self-sustaining jobs to contribute to the economic growth of the nation.”

The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Employment, Labour and Productivity, Senator Diket Plang, agreed that the ministry deserved increased budgetary allocation for more effective performance while his counterpart in the House of Representatives, Adefarati Adegboyega, spoke on the need to back the ministry on its skills development efforts, saying this would ensure a permanent solution to unemployment in the country.

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