The First Lady of Katsina State, Hajiya Zulaihat Umaru Dikko Radda, has commended the National Directorate of Employment, NDE, for its sustained efforts in job creation nationwide.
The wife of the new Katsina State governor gave the commendation on Monday when he paid a courtesy visit to the executive management team of the directorate, led by its Director-General, Mallam Abubakar Nuhu Fikpo.
According to the First Lady, “the job creation initiatives of the NDE has impacted positively on many jobless Nigerians especially the indigenes of Katsina State where thousands of jobless people have gone through diverse skills acquisition programmes of NDE and become employed.
“We came here today to appreciate NDE for her impactful job creation mandate nationwide; we are particularly happy that many indigenes of Katsina State who hitherto were unemployed had gone through different programmes of NDE and become employed. Some of them are employers of labour.”
Furthermore, “We are here to seek more areas of collaboration with the directorate so as to provide more jobs for the jobless especially the women of Katsina State.”
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The Director General, Mallam Abubakar Nuhu Fikpo, welcome the First Lady and commended her for hitting the ground running.
He said she had come to the right place for job creation benefits for the good people of Katsina State.
He said unemployment was not peculiar to Nigeria but a global challenge.
He added that unemployment in Nigeria could be best tackled through skills acquisition, entrepreneurship development and provision of blue collar jobs as being done in the developed world.
He then invited the directors of programme departments who were present at the meeting to brief the First Lady on different job creation programmes and schemes of the NDE.
The directors who spoke in turns unfolded over one hundred training schemes under the four core programmes of the directorate which are Vocational Skills Development; Micro and Small Scale Enterprises Development; Special Public Works and Rural Employment Promotion.
The office of the First Lady and NDE are to meet at a later date to fashion out expansion of the existing collaboration between the state and the directorate.
Mallam Abubakar Nuhu Fikpo used the opportunity to call on other state government authorities, parastatals, other agencies of government and philanthropists to explore the collaboration window of the NDE and assist in skills acquisition to create self-employment jobs for the jobless.
He observed that NDE is already in collaboration with many of the state governments and has created millions of blue collar jobs since inception.
He called on the jobless in Nigeria especially the youth and women groups to face reality, embrace skills acquisition and get decent jobs, saying days of white collar jobs are long gone.
