By Ebele Orakpo

At Igbinedion University, Okada, IUO students, apart from their major courses, also engage compulsorily in entrepreneurial activities at the Centre for Entrepreneurship and Skills Acquisition, CESA. 

Speaking with select journalists during the 10th Students’ Product Exhibition at the university last week, the Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Lawrence Ezemonye, noted that the institution’s mission is to produce complete, fit-for-purpose graduates who would also be employers of labour.

 According to Ezemonye, the proclamations from industries that graduates from Nigerian universities are not fit-for-purpose got him so worried that he began to wonder what could be responsible for that.

.”With a few intellectuals, we found out that it is not that our students are not properly groomed, but there is a disconnect between the demands of industry and the output of the universities. It is not an affront to anybody, it is just that there is no merger. The Nigerian education system and the industry portfolio were working in silos. The industry does not want to merge with the university and the university as an ivory tower, does not have the time for industry,” he said, adding that they have been able to change all that. He said IUO produces students that are future-ready.

” A student that is future-ready is free from unemployment, underemployment and unemployability. To avert those three syndromes, you must be entrepreneurially good. 

In IUO, the first thing we do is to inspire and stimulate entrepreneurial thinking amongst our students. The second thing is to provide the knowledge base and the knowledge exchange for the transaction of entrepreneurial thinking amongst students and the third one is the actual exhibition of the products of the inspiration, the stimulation of entrepreneurial thinking amongst our students,” he said.

The Professor of Ecotoxicology and Environmental Forensics said he has been working for the last 10 years on Industry-Academia integration. “In IU, what we have done is to imbibe the principles of co-development of programs with industry, we co-design, co-deliver, co-supervise and co-graduate the program with industry. It is logical, if an industry expert and an academic design a program together, teach the program together, supervise the program together, in some cases, co-fund the program together and graduate the students together, there is no moral basis to say that such graduate is not fit-for-purpose. Two, IUO has a Board of Industry-Academia interface, headed by Dr. Dan-Azumi Mohammed Ibrahim, Director-General of National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion, NOTAP and we have industry partners and academics on that board; they meet quarterly to review curriculum based on industry demands,” he added.

Earlier in his address, the guest speaker and Director (Policy, Partnership & Coordination), Small & Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigerians, SMEDAN, Dr Friday Okpara, regretted that Nigeria’s university system does not prepare students to be entrepreneurs, “it prepares them to carry files from first floor to the 14th floor and at the end of the day, they retire and nobody cares to ask them how they will get a roof over their head.” He praised IU for being on the right path of inculcating an entrepreneurial mindset into the students, promising that SMEDAN would deepen and broaden the partnership with the university. He said that people think they need billions of naira to start a business but on the contrary, money is the least important, the first and second being concept and capacity.

Speaking further, Okpara said that the future is skill. He advised students not to mingle with people who have never failed or succeeded.

The high point of the event was the presentation of awards and prizes to the Entrepreneurs of the Year won by the School of Textile and Fashion Design, Catering, Toiletries and Cosmetics.

Prof. Ezemonye encouraged the students by not only purchasing some of the products and placing order for more but promised that the university would be patronizing them.