The country’s rate of unemployment appeared to have gone through the roof.
Just take a walk along the main Honiara streets during a day and you’ll realise this.
Lots of people – both adults and youth – are roaming the streets doing nothing.
You see them sitting along the pavements, around betel nut stalls, and in front of shops and offices telling endless stories.
Some are university graduates, while most are school drop-outs.
In the last two months, we’ve seen a lot of new faces in the city.
These are young men and women who have just dropped out of schools.
Over the past years, they’ve lived in their villages and attended their community schools.
They became unplaced when their exam results came out early this year.
Because there’s nothing to keep them engaged in the village, they quickly made their way to Honiara in search for jobs and other opportunities.
But we know the jobs are few. So as the other opportunities!
So people ended up on the streets; doing virtually nothing.
Honiara is getting overcrowded.
There are more people in the city now than last year.
The situation gave rise to higher demand for accommodation, water, and electricity – the basic necessities city residents need to live a normal life.
Already homes have been overcrowded as new members of the extended family moved into Honiara to take residence with relatives.
Solomon Power and Solomon Water will need to keep up with the demand.
Otherwise, the city may run low on both water and electricity.
Leaders need to wake up to this reality and take the necessary steps to address it.
Unemployment is a threat to law and order, as well as peace and stability.
This is because unemployment is a recipe for criminal activities.
Our leaders love to talk about rural development.
They always promise our people that they’ll bring development to rural areas.
And so they allocated themselves a huge chunk of the development budget in the name of Constituency Development Fund (CDF).
This is money they promise to use to develop the rural areas.
But how much of the funds are used to develop our rural areas?
Very little!
This is why people are coming in their droves to the city in search for economic opportunities.
The situation is precarious so the government must take urgent steps to reverse it.
Failure would result in serious consequences for this country.
