Unemployment and Youth Restiveness in the Niger Delta Region: Interrogating Governments’ Management Strategies.

Abstract

Unemployment is an unwanted social trend and its effects on the aggrieved youth are geared towards crime. This chronic sense of grievance was created by the highly unequal distribution of resources to and within the Niger Delta region exacerbated by negligence on the part of oil multinational companies and government with respect to environmental protection and a failure on the multinational companies to create local employment as well as support local entrepreneurship. This has resulted to the levels of violence driven by criminality, impunity and corruption in the Niger Delta. Despite the attempts made by successive administrations to manage unemployment and youth restiveness in the region, the issue is generating more attention as never before. The social indicators used as a measuring rod of unemployment are crime types that were not existing in the region before now such as kidnapping and hostage taking, pipeline vandalization, youth restiveness to mention a few. The research aimed at determining whether government strategies on amelioration of unemployment and youth restiveness achieved the expected results. The researcher adopts Relative deprivation theory to explain the relationship between unemployment and youth restiveness in the Niger Delta. It adopted quantitative method. The findings among others established that youth restiveness has led to the intervention of government in addressing some of the problems in Niger Delta region through the creation of Ministry of Niger delta, establishment of Niger Delta Development Commission and establishment of National Amnesty Programme. Also, those government strategies such as implementation of National Amnesty Programme have not achieved the expected results. Hence the researcher recommended among others that government in order to strengthen her interventionist programme in the Niger Delta region should ensure proper implementation of United Nation Environmental Programme (UNEP) report, government should collaborate with relevant stakeholders in the Niger Delta region to ensure that there is strict compliance with the laws and policies aimed at reducing unemployment and youth restiveness in the Niger Delta region.