Employing youth is an urgent matter

Ever since Bouazizi set himself ablaze in Tunisia in December 2010, triggering the Tunisian revolution and the Arab Spring, self-immolation has become the ultimate expression of protest by desperate young people in the Maghreb.

This practice is symptomatic of the struggle of a portion of the Maghreb population that lost all hope in finding a “place in the sun”.

What recently happened to the young unemployed graduate Abdelwahad Zaidoune ten days ago in Morocco, falls within the same context. Feeling hung out to dry, with no alternatives other than an endless fight without prospects, Zaidoune preferred quick self-immolation over slow death.

“According to Morocco’s Economic and Social Council, young people have a worse perception of their own situation than the one showed by available statistics. This can probably be explained by their low activity.”

It is thus urgent to meet the challenge of youth employment in order to maintain national unity and revive hope. This requires setting up a large-scale national program for youth employment, mobilizing all actors and forces in the country.

Such a program must target first and foremost the young people most affected by unemployment.

It is therefore necessary to:

- Strengthen the connection between the workplace and training. There should be contract-programs between the state, training operators and companies, to set new goals in terms of training;

- Encourage and promote the services and departments in charge of internships and insertion of the graduates;

- Restructure the labor market by implementing a coherent institutional architecture, conducting continuous and relevant observation of employment and training, and expanding intermediation missions in the labor market;

- Give priority to equally qualified target populations;

- Establish a growth model capable of generating employment, both in quantity and quality, and allowing a better distribution of the produced wealth.

This model must also mobilize the available human capital, potential entrepreneurship, and the existing natural resources.

- Finally, modernize education in order to train young people that are capable of assuming responsibility, asserting personal autonomy, and developing the spirit of entrepreneurship and initiative.

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Anonymous About about 1 year ago

We agree with our great analyst, the matter is related to employment, housing, freedom, dignity, etc.

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Anonymous About about 1 year ago

Naji Al-Ghazioui. Whenever someone steals in any country, he actually steals from another citizen. Thieves are stealing ruthlessly, and the number of the poor is relentlessly increasing. Consequently, balances are disrupted, and people cannot stand that, despite their strength and strong faith. The suffering is not limited to a certain person, but it’s extended to the rest of the family, including children that no one can stand to see suffering, now or in the future. When you see your daughter, sister, or wife go to the thieves voluntarily or against their will, there is certainly something in the human chemistry that changes, and the result is an imbalanced and unusual act, even if that goes against natural laws. That means that the solution is what we’re witnessing today with the so-called Arab spring, which better be called the Arab fire. Let this raging fire become a hell, until we find ourselves before Allah. There is no God but Allah, and He is the only guarantor of justice. (Indeed, we offered the Trust to the heavens and the earth and the mountains, and they declined to bear it and feared it; but man [undertook to] bear it. Indeed, he was unjust and ignorant).

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Anonymous About about 1 year ago

What kind of cause can urge a human being to kill himself in a so brutal, insane and significant way ? Except despair due to huge amounts of frustration. It comes within the scope of political and economical logic only, and this seems, in my opinion, reasonable but not reassuring, because the category of those victims who immolated themselves, as seen in the Maghreb lately, did these self-destruction acts for different reasons, and we are now in front of a new kind of protest which gives preference to hell on earth rather than to existentialist hell. And maybe as a challenge to the foundations of the Islamic conviction, and at that point, things become more serious. We are in front of a deep questioning of the established order, which is not due to a will to change but to the will to denounce it and to have it faced with itself. I’m certainly examining this in a political way and I may seem contradictory with what I told previously, but things will clear up when we’ll analyze the common factor behind this act. This factor is nothing but this political and social desert where those who have the power in the Maghreb persist in keeping their people in archaic education systems with aged teachers, and in a total lack of socialization for the children, and which under social and family pressure becomes a social programming, one can even say a cultural training, resulting in unreality and depersonalization ; then those people are certainly easy to manage, but that is rather expensive in a national effort aiming to general welfare. That is why a long-term job is needed to eliminate the causes of this trend which is incompatble with human dignity.

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Anonymous About about 1 year ago

These are important suggestions, but youth employment should not follow the example of Algeria who bribed the youth to keep quiet, in light of soaring oil prices. Employment means an actual hiring to achieve an economic return, instead of buying consciences with alms, under the title of youth employment and pre-employment contracts. On the other hand institutions were closed, causing unemployment, advanced retirement, and embezzlement in these institutions that were sold to people with authority???? Noureddine Al-Annabi.

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