FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF UNSKILLED PEOPLE

JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA argues the need for vocational education

I used to wonder about this prayer that also forms the lyrics to a song, “some have food, but cannot eat. Some can eat but have no food. We have food and we can eat, for this we thank thee O’ Lord”. Somehow, I’d try to imagine who had it worse, the one with food who couldn’t eat or the one without food who could eat? Do not assume the answer is straight forward. In a sense, when it comes to Nigeria, the ideal would be “some have skills but have no jobs, some have jobs but have no skills…” The reality is a tad different. There are not enough skills and there are not enough jobs. You have a population of largely unskilled people with one of the world’s most reproductive rates. Except something gives, the future will be a lot of negotiating even more complicated forms of insecurity. Because skilled or not, people must survive.

Do not ask people on social media, especially the ones on X. They are hardly practical than they are emotional or given to playing to the gallery. Instead, ask anyone who has run a business for years in Nigeria and one challenge will always rank first, at worst second; there are not enough skilled people to fill available roles and where such roles have been filled, people don’t seem to know what they claimed to know before they were hired. We are one of the world’s youngest populations, and one of the most unskilled. That portends danger for the future.

The silver lining here is that it is never too late to advance a national or subnational skills development programme. The Federal Government appears to be aware of the skills gap, because in introducing a N45,000 monthly stipend for students of Technical Colleges, the government is looking to create an incentive for more Nigerians to see the value in technical education. This is a great start, but it will not be near enough.

Students may be excited to receive a monthly stipend from the government whilst in school, but what will make Technical Colleges popular is in the opportunities available to the students after school. If the skills will not earn them enough per hour or every month to sustain a respectable living, they will always be a sort of afterthought for most students. In Nigeria, the electrician, the driver, the nanny, the cleaner and other such so called “low skilled” workers never earn enough to take care of themselves and their families. That they are even referred to as low-skilled is an aberration. For this lot, you do not realise how they are such essential workers until they aren’t around to do the job. If they are so important to our daily lives, why do we pay them so little? Enough for some people to conveniently keep multiple drivers and nannies, the same people who are unlikely to hire any of such abroad.

It is not unusual to see that in the diaspora, people have learnt to do house chores and even activities that would have required for them to call the carpenter or electrician, themselves. They will get the job done but you will pay well for their skills and time. You want a plumber to fix your blocked toilet? In Nigeria, you are quick to call the plumber. They come cheap. Sometimes, if you are used to engaging them, you may not even pay a fee, you just give them “something” to take home. Elsewhere, you’d think twice about calling the plumber because you will have to part with enough sum that’d get you wondering whether it is better to learn to do things yourself. You’d eventually see that the popularity of DIY abroad isn’t for the love of DIY, it is for the love of saving money. Why do people abroad pay so much for the same services we pay next to nothing for?

We don’t play by the same rules. Elsewhere, you cannot pay any worker below a certain amount per hour. To do that would be to commit a crime. Here, the idea of minimum wage, though fought for as though it applies to the entire population, applies to government workers. Those who aren’t working in government are doomed and damned to get paid whatever those who hire them please, or in rare cases, whatever they can negotiate. This will not always be this way.

A time will come in this country when you would think twice about hiring a carpenter, a chef, nanny and the likes. You will because to pay them less than a minimum amount determined by the state would be to commit a crime. That time will be heralded by the professionalization of these skills. With that comes standardisation. Then, a bricklayer will move around with pride knowing that they went through a formal process of training and confident in the fact that if they are verified by the state as genuine professionals, they’d earn the respect and pay that’d ensure they are able to build a life with their family on their wages. We could stick to saying, “a day is coming” and that day may indeed come, or we could just get to the part of making it happen already.

Nigeria’s got little to no chance without a skilled population. Our system of education must center vocational skills and elevate them to a respectable status. Professionalization must be at the center of these reforms. That way, those who do not go through the process are not certified by the state and in that case, they cannot practice without being seen to be committing a crime. However, the emphasis cannot be on the certificate, as we have done with academics. It must be on building a country where people can do what they have been trained to do. That way, we can reverse the misfortune of being a Federal Republic of unskilled people. Therein lies the promise of a prosperous people.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/ BGX Publishing