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The fasting graduates

While Lake House treated its readers on Friday to a pageful of cheesecake pictures in full colour, presumably to show the country how wicked the UNP fund raisers were at Los Angeles, other newspapers projected a happening in not so distant Kurunegala where some graduate unemployed staged a fast-unto-death. Predictably the state media considered this event less sexy than a photo splash with which they hoped to do what some Kandawela barbecue pictures might have done for Sir John Kotelawela in 1956.

Whether the protestors at Kurunegala will really lay down their lives at the altar of the non-existent jobs that they seek remains to be seen. But those young men and women, some of them already with children of their own, are focusing on a long festering problem that remains unsolved despite the promises of politicians of all hues. The graduate unemployed are just one facet of the much bigger unemployment problem that continues to confront the country despite what economic growth that has been achieved in the face of the brutal war to which no end is in sight.

The plight of the unemployed graduates is particularly poignant because most of them soldiered on against unbelievable odds to get their degrees in the hope that the qualification would stand them in good stead in the quest of the crock of gold at the foot of the job rainbow. But too many of them were doomed to disappointment. The economy is not creating enough job opportunities for the tens of thousands of young people who enter the workforce every year. While graduates stand at the top of the queue, and perhaps feel more than others that society owes them an opportunity, the lesser qualified also are desperately in need of work.

One ugly paradox of the war is that it has in its own way made some kind of dent in the unemployment problem. Any able-bodied young man with the most basic qualification will be welcomed with open arms by the military who have for long been short of the manpower they need to prosecute the war. Enlistment falls short of actual need and any young man who wishes to join up, even if he does so for reasons of economic necessity than out of a sense of patriotism, will be grabbed with alacrity, given the basic training and sent off to the front to risk life and limb. The war needs have also opened up military and police jobs for young women who are being used for less risky duties in order to release the men for frontline duty.

Even as those who have already taken their university degrees languish in unemployment, more and more graduates are released to the job market by an increasing number of universities. Despite the growing number of places for tertiary education that are being made available by a state which in truth cannot afford unproductive investment, gaining entrance to most universities remains acutely competitive. For places in faculties such as medicine, engineering, law and to a lesser extent the science faculties, the competition is savage. Understandably so, given that those who graduate into a profession are still assured of employment even though the early signals are already being given that doctors who pass out after the year 2000 will not be assured of government jobs.

Many of those graduates who have waited for months and years for a job do not really fill the bill as far as available employment opportunities go. The luckier ones have been absorbed into an already bloated public sector and for all intents and purposes are doing largely unproductive white-collar work. The private sector which is more selective, as it does not wish to carry passengers on its workforce, is unimpressed with the calibre of the majority of unemployed graduates. True it has time and again experimented with recruits they would previously not have touched at the behest of national leaders. The results of such experiments have not been altogether unsatisfactory with quite a few young people demonstrating their mettle once they have been given an opportunity.

One basic problem is English, the knowledge of which remains the passport to privilege in this country as in many others in the region. Most employers will grab a young person with a GCE 'A' (or even sometimes 'O') with good English in preference to a graduate with no English. That is why there was a time when the angry young men and women of this country described the English language as the kaduwa or sword with which they could fight their way up the economic and social ladder. Even though the rulers are well aware that the universities particularly and the education system lower down are producing people whose skills do not match the demands of the job market, the correction process remains painfully slow.

Meanwhile protests such as that at Kurunegala will multiply. With elections approaching, the dispossessed know only too well that they have additional leverage. The possibility of a protestor really fasting to death cannot be discounted because these young people are truly desperate. That is why it must be said there are issues far more vital than cabarets in Los Angeles for our leaders to grapple with today. The war remains the worst of our problems, but that alone must not be allowed to obliterate continuing processes threatening to balloon into blow-out proportions.

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