By JONAH NWOKPOKU

A business consultant, Gregory Azemebor, has urged the federal government to invest more in human capital development in order to tackle the menace of unemployment in Nigeria.

He stated this while speaking to Vanguard on the sideline of a Youth Empowerment Seminar organised by Wealth Academy Global Initiatives in Lagos.

He said government needed to take a critical look into the unemployment problem in the country by investing  more in the creative potential of people to make them problem solvers and job creators.

According to him, “It is high time government looks into effective human capital development. And that has to do with quality education and of course we must as a matter of urgency carry out a surgical operation on our current school curriculum. We must begin to have a school system that sees education as a training of the mind to solve problems not to memorize facts. We must begin to redirect the paradigm of our educational system to empower the creative capacity of people to solve problems.”

Azemebor, who is also the founder of Voice of Change Initiative, a non-governmental organisaton, noted that there are countless opportunities for self employment in the country but laments the inability of young people to exploit such opportunities due to poor training in schools.

“There are no real employment problems in the country. What we have is scarcity of paid employments. The reason is because we do  not have enough entrepreneurs because it is entrepreneurs that create paid employments. But as far as opportunities for self employments are concerned, they are in abundance. There are lots of problems to solve in Nigeria.

In that regard you discover that the only challenge we have is that people are not trained to become self employed. People are trained to take up paid employments and there must be a paradigm shift. And that means that we must have a school system that trains people to begin to use the power of their minds to develop solutions in the form of products and services to solve problems in Nigeria that we can even export,” he said.

He however enjoined graduates who are still in search of jobs to embrace the  reality of labour market  and acquire skills that will enable them become self employed and create jobs.

“Graduates should be frank with themselves because a situation where you see the reality and you still pretend as if it is not there is self deceit. They need to understand the reality of the labour market. There are no paid employments out there but they should not lose hope. Because, if there are no paid employments, it means there are opportunities for self employments,” he said.

He added that, “They should understand that their real schooling starts from the day they graduated from school, because the challenge now is for them to create jobs for themselves since there are no jobs out there.”