The greatest problem of Nigeria is residual in the myopia of its private sector’s leadership; which is exemplified in the twin unsustainable business cultures of ‘mega profit now now’ and their wrong belief that the duty to train the next generation of skilled workers is the exclusive responsibility of ‘the failed or failing government/s and public schools.”
My business-development alter ego and ideological soulmate, Gbola Oba, who’s also a well known media commentator, once sent me an e-mail with the above quotation, two and a half years ago, when he wanted us to set an enterprise development agenda for the first set of graduates of the now famous Automedics-LASTVEB Mechatronics Institute.
The institute has so far graduated more than five hundred young persons (many came in as unskilled tertiary institutions’ graduates) and practicing artisanal roadside mechanics whose quest for knowledge and self-development led them to us.
Albeit, I felt Oba was, in his usual combative self, a bit too hard when I read the e-mail then, but two years and some months later, I’m inclined to use this powerful national media platform to enjoin leaders of private sector organisations, like myself, to rethink their human capital development agenda (and this is not a call to any form of patriotic altruism, but for sheer existential and self-serving entrepreneurial reasons).
The truth is that businesses are dying in Nigeria today because of the paucity of skilled manpower; the irony is that we (in Automedics) daily get requests and “save our souls” calls from employers in the auto maintenance/repair industry aggressively looking for competent technicians, in a nation where sixty to seventy per cent, if not more, of our youths are literally unemployed and unemployable.
The governments (despite the good intention of some political leaders and, indeed, some chiefs of the statutory agencies specially created at the national and state levels to address this socio-economic malaise) are structured to be ineffectual. The civil service’s bureaucracy and what’s-in-it-for-me-now politicians who usually constitute the agencies’ boards tend to easily frustrate the laudable intention of political leadership; who themselves always woefully fail in the area of performance monitoring.
The public schools (especially the tertiary institutions) are mostly led by men and women who, when they eventually get to the top of the greasy pole of leadership in their institutions, are usually trying to play catch up with their intellectually less brilliant colleagues, who went into the mainstream civil service, and have amassed much wealth, that they are just purely distracted from doing the needful: like stretching the hand of cooperation and collaboration to help fine-tune their stale and obsolescent curricula and position their departments to be financially self-sustaining while grooming industry-ready employable graduates.
I should know that this synergy works: About three years ago, Ben, my partner and fellow grease monkey, and I had the privilege of mentoring some senior lecturers from the University of Ibadan’s mechanical engineering department on On-Board Diagnostic-II auto scanning/examination. And a couple of months after that “college industry collabo”, as GO often calls it, the department kick-started a tuition fee-generating distant learning skills-upgrade training programme for artisanal mechanics; the beneficiaries of the varsity’s programme gained competence and confidence, while the institution benefited by making money and adding value to the society.
Also, about two and a half years ago a concerned dean then, Adegbenjo Oluyomi, in the Federal College of Education (Technical), Akoka, Lagos, literally came to beg us to take over the college’s automotive engineering department’s mentorship. We started by obliging some of the department’s students internship placements, and under a new visionary and industry-engaging provost, Siji Olusanya, the school has upped our college industry collaborative experience by literally yielding the auto department’s workshop to us to run as a functional commercial outfit, with the students actively being scheduled to serve as support hands to the professional technicians we’ll deploy to run the workshop. I can afford to say with a whiff of conceit that the college’s auto graduates will soon be the most sought-after automotive engineering graduates in Nigeria.
Therefore, when we received this message on Thursday, “Good morning, in view of the high unemployment rate of university graduates, I see a need to empower them with technical skills, like ‘basic car maintenance and repair’ can your company be of assistance? I hope to hear from you shortly” from Damilare Odumosu, technical assistant in the faculty of engineering, University of Lagos, I’m happy that the workshop inside the FCET, Unilag’s neighbour, will not only be serving the motoring public in Bariga, Gbagada, Akoka (many inside Unilag itself), Yaba and Ebutte Metta, but the leading schools’ automotive engineering students and Yaba College of Technology’s (another near neighbour) students. Motorists who are members of staff will turn the workshop into a Mecca of sort for hands-on training and a fulfilling centre for auto maintenance and repair.
In conclusion, I must mention that albeit many public schools are still very distant from industry, but many of the private schools are quite predisposed to collabo: Bells University recently wrote me to be on their mechatronics department’s advisory board and many of the private universities, who tend to compulsorily make their students acquire valuable market-ready skills, are discussing the possibility of introducing practical auto-diagnosis and auto-electrical modules in their schools for youngsters who may wish to choose any or both of the modules as their employment market preparation skills.