Wasiu Jimoh is a self-employed, who specialises in office and house furniture, home decorations. He is in charge of Anu-Oluwa Furniture Company.            Wasiu while interacting with Saturday Vanguard Business, how he became somebody out of nothing said, when nobody creates a job for you, try as much as possible to learn a skill that would empower you to create one for yourself even when you have acquired your first degree.

He said, in as much as certificate is valued, it is a matter of achievement in life. According to him, with your degree or without degree, I advise most especially youths in this country to be versatile, create jobs for themselves if they must safe their neck from the massive unemployment rocking the nation.

Excerpts:

When I finished secondary school, there was no money for me to further my education. I then decided to go and learn furniture making. I did that for some years but what matters is your ability to follow up what you are being taught and not the years spent.

You must be commitment when you want to learn anything in life so that you could come out being confident enough to create for yourself and you will gain it. But if you are not committed to it, you can spend 10 years without understanding it.

However, when I finished learning furniture making, I refused to work for anybody rather I gathered the little savings I had made with the little contribution from my relations and used it to rent a shop.

But today, I have my showrooms where I showcase them and people are rushing it because when you see those furniture, you think they are imported ones.

You can see, my apprentice when we do furniture for customers, we also help them decorate their offices and homes to make sure they receive our best services that equals international standards.

Since I have been working for myself, I have trained so many youths who are on their own and today they are also training people who would become useful for themselves tomorrow, and by so doing, we’re reducing unemployment in the country.

As far as I’m concerned, I can’t work for anybody because what I make in a day is more than what companies pay graduates in a month. With your skill you can become rich and many of us today own companies even though we started by renting shops and before you know what is happening, expansion, growth. It’s very important to skills because even in abroad you are recognised and you can easily get employed.

For youths to make it in Nigerian economic environment where government is not providing enough employment for the youths, they can enroll in some of these things when they are on vacation, pay that sacrifice because it’s about their future they want to secure so that after education if you can’t secure job, you start with what you have learnt.

One of the challenges we’ve been facing is irregular power supply. It’s affecting every business in Nigeria and we advise that government should help us provide steady power supply so that businesses can grow and when businesses grow, economy will grow and unemployment will reduce. Right now, we operate on Generator Set and that affects prices of products.