The Managing Director of International Management Training Centre (IMTC), Engineer Dare Ojo, has painted a gloomy picture of unemployment in Nigeria as a time bomb unless the federal government gives adequate attention to vocational and technical education skills. The Lagos-based IMTC is an affiliate of schools in the United Kingdom and America.

Ojo, an Information Technology professional with over a decade experience in education management, told News Express in his Ikeja office that the pressure of acquiring university degrees has created a systemic and endemic problem in the system. According to him, “acquiring university qualification may not be a bad idea but at what cost?”

He said that “in the developed countries, attention is given to vocational and technical education this in it sense tend to reduce the pressure of seeking for employment after graduation. But in Nigeria everybody wants to go to the university just with the intention of securing good jobs. By so doing they employ all kinds of means to get admission.”

The educationist noted that the number of admission seekers far outnumbers the available slots for each of the universities. “The situation is made worse after graduation with no available jobs,” he stated.

Continuing, Ojo said: “Beside the fact that Nigerian universities are underfunded, they are overstretched because of the magnitude of students that want to get in there especially the first generation universities. There was a time an ex-VC of University of Ibadan said that 16,000 applied for the institution that had only about 2,000 spaces.”

Ojo observed that in spite of the unavailability of jobs people with qualifications from schools abroad are given first-place priority by employers of labour. He however does not believe that Nigerian students are incapable of competing with students with qualifications abroad but expect the government to take steps to move the education sector forward.

Hear him: “The regulatory framework is different between Nigeria and Europe. In the UK, you have groups of people saddled with various responsibilities; there is a body that is in charge of quality assurance, there is one in charge of developing qualification framework, there is the sector skills council, a body where you have representatives of all the professions in the country irrespective of your profession. These are the people in the industry and their job is to advise the government on the emerging knowledge in the industry so the authorities can build it into the curriculum so that any graduates from the UK university can fit perfectly into the work environment. We have people in the country who have gone through five years in the Nigerian universities who have never read an application who has not even seen it.”

Continuing, the educationist said: “We are talking about the practicality of consistently developing manpower to meet specific need. What is our purpose as a nation? Where are we going to? In which areas do we have competencies? I was in Manchester in 2007 and a minister of education of a country came to showcase what they were doing in IT. I was shocked as a computer scientist that they were teaching primary and secondary school student JAVA. And what do you find around here? Computer Science students in some universities are still learning PASCA where the compilers are no longer in the market. We have a fundamental problem.

“It is not to create mega universities in every village and town that is the issues. We need to inter-channelise whatever we want to do and be well focused about it. It is not a matter of quick fix, I know that the present minister of education is doing a great job, setting education blueprint. Why would Ghana be earning billions of dollars from international students, who are Nigerians?”

•Photo shows Engr. Dare Ojo.