The Philosophies of an Unemployed Graduate

Another Friday!

It feels good to come back to the keypad to write something having received some good feedback from the previous write. We all love some positive comments, do we not?

On with today’s cry for help…

If you are the sort of person who hardly takes anything seriously like me, this is probably the best time to be a Malawian. People who sleep, eat and dream politics are in full elections mode  as we are counting months to the tripartite elections. Good stuff.

You do not need to be a keen follower for you to notice that there is some serious tension in the political atmosphere. With the country’s number two pulling crowds in all the regions and preaching the message of change, his boss could not help it but counter-argue some of his hottest points. I could have talked about the high-speed trains here but I guess people have already spent much time on schooling each other (and their president) on that one. The one that I will talk about here is that of the “1 million jobs”.

In case you are one human who lives under some rock with no connection to the outside world, our vice president who also happens to be a presidential aspirant has promised to create 1 million jobs for the youth who are languishing in unemployment. His boss, who is the current president, however has dismissed the whole thing as being overly ambitious and impossible. Ma biggy kutsutsanatu, eti?

To be honest, I am not too sure as to who to believe between the two people. On the VP’s part, he has gone on to defend himself and say that if there are people who do not know how to create jobs by the seven figures margin, they should sit on the stands and watch him do it. If you think of it, he might have a good point. After all, there are a lot of potential areas of job creation in this country and those could easily be exploited. On the other hand, looking at the magnitude of the task at hand and the timeline, I am inclined to believe that APM might just be right. I mean… Ndi 1 million tikukambayitu apa. Anyways. I might just be a pessimist in this. I should probably keep my mouth shut and pen in the pocket on this one.

Having heard about this promise of a million jobs, I found myself in a chat where me and a bunch of friends were analyzing the plausibility of creating such a number of jobs. One clever guy pointed out that the fact that we have issues with electricity, housing and road networks means that there is an almost infinite job market in Malawi. That brought in a big question from me and my fellow unemployed chap who were in this chat with the clever white collar employee; What kind of jobs are these? Are they jobs for people who spent a good four to six years in the corridors of some university or are they for a person with the biggest muscle in town? I qualify in both ends, anyway but that is beside the point; point being that the quality of the jobs also matters.

Having finished my clinical internships at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, I have had a taste of unemployment and realized how much of a frustration it can be to be unemployed when you have your papers gathering dust at home. That is the main reason I raised the issue of the quality of jobs that young people in this country need.

Once in a while, I find myself chatting with friends most of whom are graduates. In such casual chats, it is not a very unusual thing for me to pose a question of whether the life they are living is the one they dreamt of five years prior to the present day. The question attracts a diverse range of answers but the interesting thing is that most admit that they are not yet living the good life they fantasized years back. Slow progress or something of the sort.  Most of these people point out the lack of a smooth transition from college education to the industry as the reason they do not get into the dream life as quickly as they want to.

In the utopian world we live as innocent children, the normal human life (education/career) cycle entails that one launches himself from primary school into some decent secondary school before nicely proceeding to college and then landing on some government or private sector job. Nice and easy. No difficulties whatsoever. In the wake of the modern day, however, the stumbling blocks that lie along the way are just too many. Securing a place in a good secondary school is not much of an easy job and the capacity of the public universities is just too low. When you finally get out of the university with your degree, jobs are hard to come by even in the education and health sectors where having a job used to be a guarantee upon the completion of tertiary training. Pretty much not the case in the modern day.

We previously had one genius guest writer who told us that the way to navigate around job hunting is to be like a tree. He is yet to finish the two parts of the tripartite series and hopefully when he does we will all be like trees and nicely employed.

Perhaps we could also turn to the gospel of entrepreneurship that has been spreading like a wildfire over the years. I have seen it work for a good number of guys and I think it is worth a shot. If my memory serves me right, there is one minister who took this gospel a step further. When he was asked to preside over a nursing students’ graduation, he went on to challenge the graduands that they needed to take their eyes of the government as the provider of employment and explore entrepreneurship. These were nurses he was talking to and if you do not know nurses are in short supply in this country. Anyway. He might have been right from other perspectives that I cannot relate with.

Perhaps the best way of handling unemployment is the act of constantly making oneself better while continually exploring all the options on the shelf. Read. Learn. Volunteer.  For people of faith, this is one thing you “take to the LORD in prayer”. In line with the elections, we might as well vote for the person who is promising a lot of jobs and bank on the hope that he will deliver when he gets elected.