By FAVOUR NNABUGWU & AMINAT AMUDA

National Universities Commission, NUC is making frantic efforts to correct the employment imbalance in the number of graduates churned out from universities across the nation.

NUC’s Executive Secretary, Professor Julius Okojie said in Abuja that the commission would strengthen its relationship with industries around the country in order to employ more of Nigerian graduates.

Okijie who described the present rate of unemployed graduates as imbalance, regretted that Nigerian universities churn our thousands of graduates in different fields without adequate provision for them.

“In Nigeria, we talk about engineering students but the industries are not there, people are saying that our graduates are not employable, what are their potentials? We need to go back to the old system because the average Nigerian is resilient. Each time l hear our graduates are not employable, I begin to wonder what could be the factor.”

He said the commission’s qest to enhance its relationship with industries will not only improve the quality of service delivery but widen the scope of employment opportunities.

Okojie, however, urged Nigerian universities to teach entrepreneurship courses at degree level, stating that some universities of the world have already commenced entrepreneurial courses.

He cited America as a country that has community colleges where entrepreneurship courses are taught and urged Nigerians to imbibe the system adding that no country will survive without providing adequate facilities that will help to upgrade the skills of graduates that are roaming the streets.

The NUC boss lamented  the lack of facilities in schools as some of the challenges bedeviling the proper acquisition of skills amongst the nation’s youths.

Speaking earlier, Prof. Murtala Sagagi, director of the Centre for African Entrepreneurship, Research and Training said that the curriculum was introduced into the university programmes to inculcate discipline and value orientation amongst the teeming youths.

Sagagi  further said that benefits that were accruable from the introduction of the course including the encouragement of creative skill and attitude, impacting the lecturers through capacity building, ensuring the production of enough teachers to teach the course and promoting the diversification of available degree progranmmes instead of narrowing the choices of students.