EDUCATION: NIGERIAN UNIVERSITIES AND THEIR GRADUATES; TIME FOR AN OVERHAUL

How well prepared, equipped and educated are our Nigerian university graduates for the employment market as against the graduates from the privately owned tertiary institutions in Nigeria?

Some have persistently described graduates from Nigerian universities as unemployable as they cannot effectively compete or stand their grounds with other graduates especially so with the privately run universities.

What does this portend for our youths? It has become very imperative for the government and stakeholders alike to sit down and fashion out ways to remedy the situation as it is daily going from bad to worse.

There is greater need for the Ministry of Education and all stakeholders, to build a sustainable developmental programme that will provide for a proper planning and monitoring of students, especially now so that the whole world now sees Nigerian graduates as not only unfit for employment, but also not capable of competing with their peers.

This is not true. Agreed there are some who have their deficiencies, it does not generally apply as the rule.

Nigeria can boast of very bright, highly intelligent and very capable students despite the poor educational policies of government at the federal and state levels. And this is happening within the nation itself. Nigeria has students that can effectively compete with their peers anywhere in the world but then; we also need the government and those formulating our educational policies to do just the needful if we must, as a country, stand tall amongst the comity of nations.

Only recently, a video went viral online, of two female members of the National Youths Service Corps, NYSC in a spell chat which has positioned them as having failed to lived up to the billings of being called graduates of higher institutions.

The video, according to reports monitored from THE SHEET, posted on Instagram by a user, @fattiymaht1 is attracting so much negative commentaries already.

In the said video which was more of an interview, the female NYSC members were asked to spell the word, “Yoghurt” and they failed woefully. So much for graduates.

Many are of the opinion that the video provides further evidence that many Nigerian graduates are unemployable.

An administrator; Miss Fasuyi who heads the School of Enterprise at the prestigious Ibadan Business School, Ibadan, Oyo State, in an interview, recently told The Nation Newspaper that poor curriculum in most universities is such that is completely out of tune with the requirements of modern times, thus majority of Nigerian graduates can’t compete with their peers anywhere in the world.

“It is quite disconcerting to note that majority of our universities are out of tune with what’s happening in the rest of the world. You can imagine that some of the courses which were taught some five decades ago are still being taught with little or no innovation. Are we saying there have been no new changes in those fields? You can’t rely on jaded ideas to survive in the 21st century,” she said.

Late in 2015, the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation, UNIDO, also revealed that the unemployment rate in the country is high because many Nigerian graduates do not have the required skills to secure jobs.

According to UNIDO representative, Olumide Ayodele, in the course of an assessment study, it was found that there are many vacancies in industries in the country but no skilled graduates to fill them, adding that there is a mismatch between the skills and the supply of skills in Nigeria.

According to Ayodele, there is need for Nigerian universities to have a comprehensive and sustained data base and alumni data of graduates, what they studied, where they are, what those working are earning and so on and so forth.

He said, “Youth unemployment in Nigeria is a time bomb waiting to explode. These are questions we need answers to, on a consistent basis. Nigeria has no business with unemployment. We have the resources and the people to ensure people are engaged.”