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Nigeria: Skills Oriented Education is What Country Needs - Ibeneche, LNG MD

Olubusuyi Adenipekun

1 January 2009

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The nation's educational system equips students only with explicit knowledge which exposes students to learning by rote without necessarily leading to the acquisition of skills badly needed for production processes.

Mass unemployment among school leavers, widespread ignorance and poverty as well as acute industrial backwardness are the results of this deficient system of education, which has made the nation to be complacent as a consumer one instead of learning to produce what its citizens need and what others need.

This hard knock came from the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Nigeria Liquified Natural Gas Limited, Engr. Chimaobi Jonathan Ibeneche while delivering a lecture entitled.

"Production: An Essential Ladder for Learning and Economic Emancipation."

"When I observe Nigeria today, I do not see a learning society. We have hordes who go after explicit knowledge. We learn by rote and do not translate the explicit knowledge (knowledge about a school subject) to procedures and have no means of turning it into implicit skills that lead to productive process.

We have learned to consume the products of other economies, but we have avoided learning to produce what we need or even what others need. Little wonder that we are challenged with providing employment for our school leavers," says Engr. Ibeneche.

He continues: "An organisation or a culture can only be said to have acquired knowledge when a broad section of the population has become repeat doers. Then the knowledge will have found its way into applications in the production processes of the organisation, and in the economy and culture of the people.

A typical knowledgeable society will have a few elite who operate as creators of knowledge working mainly at the theoretical level, many more who act as adapters and innovators working at the practice level, and most people acting as repeat doers working at the application level."

Explaining that a functional education is the type that empowers the people to use the accumulated knowledge to produce products and services that have economic value, the LNG boss says that this type of education is non existent in Nigeria because "we do not have enough production activities to force people to really learn."

In an attempt to encourage a change that will make Nigeria to give importance to functional education, which will ultimately lead to her economic emancipation, Engr. Ibeneche advises Nigeria to take a cue from the heavy investment in human capital development which Japan and the Asian Tigers (Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore and Hong Kong) undertook before being transformed from technological backwardness to relatively modern and affluent economies.

Engr. Ibeneche says: "In 1871, a group of Japanese politicians known as the Iwakura Mission toured Europe and the USA to learn Western ways. Education was expanded and Japanese students were sent to study in the West. Japan today is the second largest economy in the world, after the United States at around 4.5 trillion US dollar in terms of nominal GDP and third after the United States and China in terms of purchasing power parity."

He continues: "Experts have tried to explain the success of the Asian Tigers by two theories- Assimilation and Accumulation theories. The later theory stresses the role of investments in moving these economies along their productive functions. Hearing investment in machinery, especially those with in-built technology helped in no small way to push these countries along the path of rapid industrialisation."

"These were supported by training, research and apprenticeship and by efforts of study groups to technology-exporting countries. In the end, it is a strategy that transforms them from consumers to producers that made the difference. Production for export creates the necessary condition for learning and the knowledge enables better and more production."

While driving home his point that the act of production, which can only be ensured by functional education, leads to acquisition of the essential knowledge for better productivity that results in economic emancipation, the LNG boss further says: "The Assimilation theory stresses ideas - entrepreneurship, innovation, apprenticeship, and learning - that these economies had to go through before they could master the new technologies they were adopting from the more advanced industrial nations.

East Asian latecomers did not leapfrog from one vintage of technology to another. On the contrary, the evidence shows that the firms engaged in a painstaking and cumulative process of technological learning: a hard slog rather than a sharp dash."

Nigeria, according to him, must therefore accept that productive capacity, underpinned by a virile human capital and based on knowledge, is the real wealth of the country - not the oil and gas or the solid minerals it is naturally endowned.

For Nigeria to become one of the top 20 economies in the world, Engr. Ibeneche offers the following leeway: That there should be a new emphasis on quality education aimed at broadening access to practical and adaptive knowledge that can be used in production, an education which recognises that most people should be taught skills and competencies that are useful in the productive process.

There should be a widespread creation of avenues and opportunities for apprenticeships in productive skills. There should be accessible institutions where young people can go to learn various trades, adding that these institutions should provide training that can be certified to meet minimum standards of proficiency acceptable to employers in industry.

Another way of catapulting Nigeria to the path of greatness, according to Engr. Ibeneche, is to ensure proper regulation and control of the jobs of artisans and crafts people, explaining that there is a crying need for standards and the enforcement of minimum standards in the work of auto mechanics, electricians, masons and other building artisans as the absence of standards and enforcement leads to a lot of waste and excessive cost of production.

Lastly, economic policies that give priority to export of manufactured and processed goods must be put in place, saying that this is critical as it will impose the strict discipline of the market standards on the nation's local production.

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