Kenyan youth are partly to blame for the soaring unemployment in the country and the dwindling number of investors arriving in Nairobi to set up businesses and create jobs.
This is according to Prof. Fred Ogola, an economist and a governance expert.
In a media interview on Wednesday, December 6, Prof. Ogola accused youths of portraying Kenya in bad light, especially on social media.
Consequently, the governance expert argued that young people are scaring away potential investors owing to their habit of complaining about everything on various social media platforms.
Also, Ogola compared Kenyan youth online and those from developed countries whom he lauded noting that they invite potential investors to their countries something that did not happen in Kenya.
“If you go to Kenyan social media, you will think Kenya is at war. Go to the social media of South Korea, you find that people are even inviting people to come to their country to invest,” he said.
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Furthermore, the economist urged the youth to stop complaining and embrace the current situation adding that they need to encourage more people to visit and invest in the country.
“When did you see a young person tweeting and saying, please come and visit our Maasai Mara, its beautiful. All they are saying is oh this oh that, but we want the noise to end so that we can have a peaceful country,” he added.
Job Loss Among the Youth
Likewise, Prof Ogola expressed concerns over the number of people loosing formal jobs in the country due to the deteriorating state of the economy.
“Do you know we are losing 189 jobs per day, and I am not talking about informal jobs but formal where people earn an average of 120,000 shillings?” he posed.
When asked the cause for the job loss, the professor noted that it was the people who were making a lot of noise about the state off the economy in the country that were scaring investors.
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Notably, President William Ruto during his presidential campaigns pledged to ensure that his government allocated Ksh 100 billion to the youth empowerment program.
However, according to the World Bank, the unemployment rate in Kenya was 10.4% in 2022, up from 5.2% in 2021. This means that over 1.7 million Kenyans lost their jobs in 2022.
Similarly, according to the Kenya Economic Survey 2023, unemployment rate was highest among young people, with 36.6% of young people aged 15-34 unemployed in 2022.
However, during his state of the nation address, President Ruto noted that they were creating more jobs with the formalization of the Jua Kali clusters.
Notably, he said architects, engineers, quantity surveyors, masons, electricians, plumbers, transporters, steel and cement factory workers, and hardware merchants would have jobs in the affordable housing scheme.