Dr Chris Ngige
The Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr Chris Ngige, says
education that is not directed towards job creation is useless.
Ngige, therefore, said there was a need for schools to revise
their current curricular to reflect modern challenges and
development, according to a statement by the Director of Press at
the Ministry of Labour, Samuel Olowookere.
The minister said this in Abuja on Tuesday while addressing a
breakfast session of the ongoing National Economic Summit (#24) in
Abuja with the theme, ‘Multi-Sectoral Roundtable on Job Creation
and Skills Development in Nigeria’.
He said, “With a working population of over 80 million, the
majority of who are unemployed, we have to do something radical,
the narrative must change. School curriculum must change to include
new and emerging skills. Education is power but it is useless when
it is not in the right direction. We, therefore, must collaborate
to solve this problem.”
The minister emphasised the need for a paradigm shift in
approach to job creation as the current efforts might not be
sufficient to create the jobs needed to gainfully engage over 80
million people.
In his remarks, the Executive Secretary of the National
Universities Commission, Prof. Abubakar Rasheed, expressed the
readiness of the commission to partner with organisations and
groups to transit Nigeria into a knowledge-based society, thereby
facilitating a knowledgeable economy.
Earlier, in his remarks, the Chief Executive Officer of the
Nigerian Economic Summit Group, Mr Laoye Jaiyeola, stated that
individual efforts would not produce the much-needed result on job
creation as each organisation was doing something in bits and
pieces.
