He said the high unemployment rate was inimical to national stability and security.

Ahmed spoke in Ilorin on Tuesday on the sidelines of the state government’s public enlightenment programme tagged: ‘The governor explains’.

He, therefore, called for conscious, pragmatic and articulated programmes to create jobs and other empowerment strategies to meaningfully engage the youth.

According to him, the state government’s ‘Quick Win Job Creation Initiative’ is designed as a platform to boost job creation and productively engage the youth.

Claiming that Kwara has the least unemployment rate in the country, the governor said, “As a state and as a government, we look at the composition of Kwara and we recognised that we have a plethora of unemployed youths and it is a very critical situation for us. We are also happy to know that Kwara State has the least of unemployed youths when we checked the statistics nationwide.

“So, it tells you that the effort to get us there was deliberate and we want to improve on that. We cannot afford to take the destiny of our youths into an adventure. It has to do with stability and security of this country.

“Our youths are unemployed. We must begin to create hope in our youths and that hope is the essence of our empowerment schemes.”

Ahmed said the state government started the Kwara Bridge Empowerment Scheme in 2011 to move the youth from idleness to empowerment, and ultimately job placements.

Stressing that the government placed priority on the development of the youth, he added that his administration would be more committed to their empowerment this year.

The governor said that the state government would this year recruit minimum of 8,000 youths.

According to him, the Kwara Bridge Empowerment Scheme is designed to create hope for the youth and ensure that they have confidence in the government.

Ahmed said, “The government will not renege on any promise with regard to the KWABES. We designed the programme to move our youths from idleness to empowerment. At the level of empowerment, we intend to move more of them to regular paid jobs.

“When we started the KWABES, we took some of them to the public sector and some of them to the private sector. We do not have the capacity to insist on the private sector to recruit people.”

He added that majority of those attached to the public sector had been absorbed into the civil service.

“As a matter of policy, every absorption that has come in through the government, either through the Civil Service Commission, Teaching Service Commission, State Universal Basic Education Board or Local Government Service Commission, we take cognisance of those in the KWABES first,” Ahmed said.

The governor explained that the KWABES recruits would be the first to be converted to regular employment before the others.

He claimed that the government had absorbed over 3,000 of the 5,000 KWABES recruits into the civil service, while the others had gone into the private sector.

The governor said, “We have never reneged. Don’t forget that the process is to move youths from idleness to empowerment. It doesn’t imply that all the youth must necessarily end up as salary earning individuals.

“You can move from there and to enjoy what we have put up under the micro-credit scheme and become an entrepreneur. It is not cast in stone that everybody must move into salaried jobs.”