Peter Osalor

In a July 2008 interview, the prominent Vangurd newspaper had a candid question for a senior office_bearer of the Manufacuturers Association of Nigeria _ are “our young graduates… not employable anymore?” The answer is a shocking indictment of the state of Nigerian education:“You cannot talk to a graduate and be convinced that he is one.”

This admission by a captain of industry confirms the essential suspicion about the quality of education in Africa’s second largest economy.Tangentially, it’s gestures towards the problems of massive unemployment, brain_drain, and manpower shortages that continues to cripple domestic efforts to achieve rapidly suatainable growth. For qualified youthe looking for a job, it also explains the prolonged and intensive pre_recruitment tests that Nigerian corporate houses insist on before jiring local talent.

Western education first came to Nigeria with missionaries in the middle of the 19th century, who set up the country’s first schools. By the time Nigerians declared independence from colonial rule in 1960 there were three distinct education systems in operation: indigenous community training apprenticeship in rural areas, schools of Islamic learning and finally formal education provided by European_influenced institutions. Although pressure on the formal education syatem remained intense in the following, the collapse of global oil prices in the early 80’s forced huge reductions in govenment spending on education.

The outcome was a gradual degradation at all levels of learning, from primary schools to universities, and a corresponding fall in literacy and employment rates. According to a 2005 report, the overall literacy rate had fallen from 72% in 1991 to 64% at the end of the last century.

More disturbing facts were put forward by the Employment and Growth Study launched by the Nigerian government and the World Bank’s International Development Agency in 2008. According to this study, unemploymentlevels reamined unfazed between  despite a 7% growht of non_oil economy in thesame period. Moreover, while job opportunities grew corresponding with the labour force, youth unemployment actually showed substantial increase.

The reports note accordingly that “Nigeria’s growth performance has not responded to the emplotment aspirations of its population as a whole”. Despite considerable initiatives in the fields of education and employment generation, one out of five Nigerian adults continues to be unemployed according to some estimates, and only every tenth university graduate ever manages to get a job.

The findings are revelatory in the context of Abuja’s frantic efforts to priotise educational restructuring as a tool for economic competitiveness. It is also a sad commentary on the fficacy of well_intended but probably token policy initiatives _ like the compulsory entrepreneurship training programme for all college graduates ordered by former President Olusegun Obasanjo.

While the relative merits of such measures acan be debated endlessly, the focus on enterprise is hardly in question. Emerging out of a turbulent economic and political history at the begining of the new millenium, the civilian leadership in Nigeria was grasped with the formidable challenge of reversing decades of economic stagnation and negative growth trends. Abuja’s answet to accelerated development was vigorous enterprise promotion in the SME space.

The governemnt simultaneously embarked on an enthusiatic reforms rogramme aimed at correcting basic microeconomic imbalances, eradicating poverty and raising average living standards. o further consolidate national ambitions, it signed the United Nations Millenium Declaration of 2000 for universal human rights and formally adopted targets to establish Nieria as one of the top 20 world economies by 2020.

With it’s abundance of natural and human resources, Nigeria is primed to to drive an enterprise revolution that will deliver explosive growth and suffficiently diversify the economy beyond it’s traditionalobsession with oil and gas. Education is critical to the scheme of things because of it’s direct likn to productivity, and because the extent of Nigeria’s economic growth is fundamentally dependent on the skills of it’s workforce.