OPINION: Graduate Bus Conductor for N50,000?

Simbo Olorunfemi wrote:

Last week, I heard the Acting Commissioner for Transportation in Lagos discredit this report about plans to recruit University Graduates as Bus Conductors in the state.

The plan, according to him, is simply to employ Bus conductors. He could not understand where the story that they must be University Graduates came from.

As to be expected, that rebuttal did not gain any traction as it could not arrest the 'juicier' version galloping all over town. Difficult to even make any sense of the criticism that has come with this.

One would think anyone recruiting at this time will be commended.

I hear it is demeaning a use to put University Graduates.
I hear N50,000 is too small.

Really?

Thousands of University Graduates are presently earning less in the private sector -organised and disorganised.

I know a Mechanical Engineering graduate earning N30k as Physics Teacher in a private school, yet has to travel from Iju to Ikeja, GRA.

There are many who have to travel from Okokomaiko to Lekki for much less than N50k.

So, what is the problem?

It is not what you earn at the moment but where you are headed.

How much are they paying Corpers at the moment? Are those ones not University Graduates?

Do you know how much some soldiers paying the supreme sacrifice for the nation earn?

One good thing that has come out of this 'brouhaha' is the stories of how many who are 'big' men today started out in not too dissimilar conditions.

Some of us earned less than what we were paid as NYSC allowance on our first jobs.

Some us with post-graduate degrees had to make do with what might be regarded as menial jobs. today. What is the big deal?

There are some jobs one should gladly take even if one has to be the one to pay the employer! Is that not how the local apprenticeship scheme works?

Some jobs we were paid starvation wages for taught us so many things we are still earning from even today.

If what we have now is recession and a 'menial' job is there for N50k, then what we had when some of us left school must have been something else. It was so bad that here was an official embargo on recruitment into the public service.

Some of us wrote the ASCON Civil service exams and passed and yet for years, they didn't call anyone up. There were simply no jobs. There was no internet. No telephone. No Jobberman. You had to buy the newspapers and send you application through the Post Office. There was absolutely nothing. It was the age of darkness. Yet, many managed to navigate their ways out to be wherever they are today.

Wish I had the luxury of a N50k job, starting out.

Some of us, as University Graduates, started out with what then was less than the minimum wage.
Even with your PhD, is it not better to take that 50k job for the moment, while you strategize for the future, rather than spend time whining?

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