by Olajire Philip

Nigeria is a country where all big investors have no inventions (tangible or intangible) to their credit. Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Michael Dell, Thomas Edison and the likes all have products to patent, but most entrepreneurs we have in Nigeria have invented nothing and have made it through dubious means.

Entrepreneurship/vocational education is government’s way of telling the youth and graduates that she (the government) lacks industrialisation and job creation strategies while the youth have been left to fate.

Entrepreneurship/vocational education is government’s way of making the youth/graduates look intellectually lazy and burdensome as well as telling them that they are have been abandoned in the valley of unemployment. Unemployment rate increased simply because government owned industries and companies got strangulated by the python of corruption as well as the refusal of the government to establish new ones.

Entrepreneurship in other countries is about innovations, inventions, replication, improvements, expansions, people and institutional empowerment. Modern and sophisticated skills are being utilised to manufacture goods and services which culminates into abundant job creation while in Nigeria, it is about the graduate job seeker engaging in bead-making, soap making, hair dressing, laundry and so on. These businesses have nothing to add to the business practice and the economy as they also have little or no impact on the international market.

Entrepreneurship in Nigeria is also of the rich colluding with the government to defraud the masses, destroy public corporations and infrastructures in order to import alternative goods. The rich set up few enterprises and often pay peanuts to their employees in order to increase their wealth; culminating in under-employment.

The government of advanced countries often invest billion of dollars on education and research, so they always have intellectuals who offer innovative products and services to the world. These products and services are initially developed into small scale businesses as they may even grow into large enterprises. Nigeria keeps wasting hard earned funds on Small and Medium Scale (SME) development, yet the businesses are nowhere to be found.

Only an insane person will keep doing the same thing the same way and expect a different result. I am yet to see a nation that got developed by investing so little on the education of her youth and students but spend so much on SME propaganda. Still searching for a nation that gave nothing more than vocational training to her youth and achieved rapid industrial development.

Did the United States of America achieve greatness by emphasizing vocational training? I wonder if it were mere phone repair training that brought China among the world’s mobile phone producers. Over and again I see entrepreneurship and vocational education as a scam.

Every sector of the Nigerian economy has been badly affected by the erroneous policy of entrepreneurship and vocational education. From the agricultural sector to the transportation sector, from manufacturing to education, from construction to entertainment, name it, we have rendered our nation incapacitated when it comes to production of goods and services, just because we keep executing this lame practice.

I wonder why we have not given so much vocational training to professionals operating as doctors, nurses and pharmacist in the medical field. We give this set of people training that make them compete favourably the world over. It is only proper to substitute entrepreneurship and vocational education with the training they receive in the Teaching Hospitals.

It is high time we changed our job creation policy of entrepreneurship and vocational studies to provision of qualitative education at all levels, especially science and technology education so that Nigerian graduates will have the requisite skills necessary to develop a nation like Nigeria. It is only qualitative education and intensive research that can initiate intellectual thinking for creation of innovative goods and services.

Let our laboratories and workshops be adequately equipped with modern facilities so as to provide avenues for learning practicals. We need to replicate the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who utilized the qualitative education they obtained in the tertiary institutions to create world class business ventures.

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