The Discourse: Unemployment, Culture And Mental Health

• Dr. Adeoye Oyewole

WORK, unemployment and specific conditions at work have been shown to have considerable influence on mental health and mental illness, and utilization of mental health services. Rates of mental illness are higher in the unemployed than in people at work. There is evidence from longitudinal studies that unemployment, actual redundancy itself and the threat of redundancy cause mental illness.

The Nigerian situation is increasingly alarming as our higher institutions keep turning out graduates with different kinds of certificates into the job market. A good number are psychologically immobile and apparently redundant which provides the breeding ground for mental distress and possibly mental illness. 

High rate of unemployment derives principally from poor mental capacity development which renders our graduates unemployable. They are often times not proficiently available for the jobs their certificates advocate for them. There is a fundamental disconnect between the educational or vocational training they have received and the potential specifications of employment opportunities that exist in our polity. Usually, we blame the government for the rising unemployment while we fail to interrogate the social facilities that are responsible for developing employable capacities in our youths. 

In the pre-colonial times, education was principally by oral tradition through apprenticeship augmented by folklores that reinforce values that guarantee sound attitude in a career. The unemployment is due to the disconnect between available capacity and the potential job opportunities and inability to create such opportunities. A perusal of the MBA program of the Lagos Business School managerial anthropology as one of the courses which could help banish the neocolonialism argument as basis for rising unemployment.  

There is virtually no sociocultural milieu that has not been affected by globalization; Dubai emirate is an eloquent testimony of a creative synergy of the western model of development and conservative Arab emirate culture without loss of identity. I will describe this as the ultimate goal of education; creative assimilation of new ideas into an existing sociocultural facility without loss of identity. The colonial mandate of education was initially self-serving but with time, the inherent capacity of education liberated our nationalists who paraded one of the most sophisticated challenges to colonialism in Africa.

Education liberates, empowers and confers economic value through service. This is the fundamental principle of mental capital as superior to ordinary mental health. The intellectual class failed to tailor the colonial educational structures to our peculiar sociocultural needs.  The Chinese economy has benefitted strongly from the ideas of others that they have taken time to assimilate into their own culture. 

The Nigerian intellectuals have wasted too much time in the blame game without looking inwards and synergizing our traditional educational philosophy with the colonial model. Our lectures, our curriculum orientation and the procedure of conferring professorship is essentially devoid of creativity and elegant contribution to knowledge. The philosophy of ivory-towerism is characterized by sighting societal problems from a vantage position and creatively deploying intellectual resources in finding solution to them.

The rising rate of unemployment among our college graduates is an indictment of their productivity. The pre-colonial rulers’ hip cultural software overtook our academicians who viewed intellectualism as a means of social class ascent and exploitation of the vulnerable.  The raging menace of book haram derives from the perceived evil that western education has caused rather than build employable capacity. 

Education is not just about literacy and competency alone; but a process of inculcation of values that equips a person to be an asset to the society rather than a menace. The oil wealth entrenched mediocre values on the polity that overtook the intellectuals and the priesthood who should have safe guarded our value. Our economy that is basically primitive surviving on the chance fortunes of oil but not in any way linked to productivity.

Our religious systems parade a brand of prosperity that is not traceable to productivity that can inspire the young unemployed ones. They are encouraged to come for prayers so that they can move into a position of affluence not derivable from creativity but crass opportunism. I describe this as delusion rather than faith. Faith appraises the situation and takes a rational inventory of the situation and systematically lays claim to the power of omnipotence in the process of developing capacity and creating wealth. Delusion fuels fantasy in these youngsters who are rendered psychologically immobile, redundant, unemployed and unemployable who may later come down with mental illness when they discover that there is a disconnect between their delusions and real-life experiences. 

I counsel our young unemployed graduates to look inwards and  take an objective stock of what their strengths are irrespective of their certificates.; study the environment and move into the available opportunities no matter how modest and commence the process of wealth creation through service. This is definitely an enormous mental capital.

• Dr Adeoye O. Oyewole is a consultant psychiatrist, life coach, mental health advocate, author, theologian and anthropologist