Femi Deru is a former president of the Lagos State Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In this interview with SIMON EJEMBI, he talks about issues relating to employment such as mismatch of skills
The International Labour Organisation recently published a report which says skills mismatch is affecting job creation. How does this happen?
Before you can have a skill, you must have gone through some training and that training requires you to have either been in a university – training to be X, Y, Z. If you are a doctor and you are looking for a job, you go to the hospital. If you are a specialist, for instance, there may be a mismatch for you because you may not get the type of job you need in Nigeria because of the special skill that you have got. That is an example of how the problem of a mismatch of skills may arise.
There may be a need for such a specialist but it may not be required in this country. So you have to readjust by taking up a soft job, which may not have the skill requirements as the one you have trained for. But invariably, a country like Nigeria must know the skills that are needed. When I was in the industry, we had our own training school which is for our own technicians. We wanted them to have a global education so they attended evening classes for the purpose – to get an HND or OND in engineering. And then we had our own training which we adapted to our own requirements because the general programme may not necessarily cater to our own needs. So you always need to retrain yourself when you have got the basic qualification.
What is responsible for this?
What is responsible is that the universities are just giving education without looking at what is required in Nigeria. Some of them just decide that they want to train mechanical engineers, whereas you may need mechanical engineers who will be working in a special skill job. Also, they don’t tie that education with the skills available. They should send the students for industrial training in relevant organisations – where those skills are needed, so that by the time those people graduate they would have already applied part of their skills in that organisation.
How can the problem be remedied?
The way to remedy it is to make sure that the educational system takes into consideration the requirements of Nigeria vis-à-vis the curriculum. Take agriculture, for instance, you know we are talking about infrastructure now; the educational system needs to produce agriculture graduates who can preserve the yield so that we don’t waste much of our harvest. And the companies who are in that sector will need graduates who are skilled in that aspect. But if you don’t train them specifically in that area and they only know about crop rotation, they will be nobody to employ them. So, the requirements of the country must be considered in the formulation of syllabus content.
Some people say the lack of career counselling and the eagerness of parents for their children to study specific courses are partly responsible. What do you make of this view?
Think about the instances where the parents are not even educated; they don’t even know what to advise their children to do. So that may be a part of it, but it is not a major factor. You see, career counselling is more now, even in secondary schools and in other places. For instance, my interest as young boy was to be a doctor, because I heard people talking a lot about doctors (medical doctors); I didn’t know what it entailed. It was later I realised that if I didn’t do the science subjects I would not be able to be a doctor; and science subjects were not taught in my school. That is a different thing; it is not the case of mismatch; it is not what leads to a mismatch of skills. Some people want to study particular courses and they have the requirements but the universities don’t offer those courses so they end up studying something else. Career counselling is about determining what your ambition is and whether the country requires it. It is about determining what a child’s talent is and how he can put it to use. You may see flair in a child for acting and advise the child to go for training in a field; that is counselling and it is not responsible for the mismatch of skills and available jobs.
Many people have said Nigerian graduates are unemployable. What do you think of the view?
Well, we want to have excuses for everything. In every place there are many unemployed people, but when you start to use words like ‘unemployable’ generally, you are degrading the level of education that we have here. What people are saying is that a graduate in English may not even be able to write good English and so if you want to use him in The PUNCH, for instance, as a journalist, you will have a problem. But one can go to the school of journalism for training; he or she just needs to have the flair for it in the first place. What people are saying is that many graduates need to be retrained to be able to work. If you say you want to be a teacher and you don’t go for specific training, how do you become a teacher? Many people using the term ‘unemployable’ are using it derogatorily to say ‘most of the graduates just went through the university’. I think it is the burden of corruption that is responsible for some of these issues like examination malpractice. If not, if you say you have a first class in a particular course, how can you be unemployable? It is true that some consultants have come across people who for instance say they studied accounting but when they are asked about the content of a balance sheet, they can’t even answer right away. But if they had been working (via industrial attachment) in an accounting firm, they would know all those things without even graduating from the university. It is a problem of really not having jobs to apply what they studied for years after they graduate.
You talked about companies training graduates to specifically function in the industry in which they operate. To what extent would you say this retraining still happens?
Twenty to 30 or 40 years ago, companies like UAC would go to the universities and pick workers they need, employ them and call them trainee graduates or graduates in training. But now that there are many graduates in the country, very few companies do that. When you want 10 graduates and you get applications from 1,000, you try to reduce them by one means or the other, selecting those who will fit into your industry right away. The training done in the past did not mean the graduates were unemployable; it is just something done to enhance the job you have for them, to get them to fit into your own industry.
Punch Nigeria
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