The nagging inadequacies of the nation’s tertiary education system are manifesting again as government seeks to diversify the economy by shifting focus from oil to agriculture.
Over the years, corporate organisations across sectors in the country had complained of having to retrain Nigerian tertiary institutions’ graduates because of skills lapses but the agric sector recorded little of this.
As government captures the buy-in of corporates and individuals into agriculture however, complaints are starting to mount about the shortcomings of Nigerian agic graduates, particularly regarding mechanised agriculture.
Pieter Nel, general manager at Olam Nigeria’s 10, 000 hectare farm (with 4,400 cultivated for rice) in Nasarawa, remarked during a BusinessDay tour of the facility, that “besides the skills required, what we are finding out is that the people coming out of the universities require training. This is because the universities are not training mechanised agriculture, what they are teaching is basic agriculture.”
To address this, Olam has to bring the graduates (and also students on industrial training) on board, while also getting external consultants from different countries to come and advice on crop management and to also provide training to Nigerians who have been employed. This also makes it more attractive to employ foreign trained graduates over their Nigerian counterparts.
It has been suggested by experts and stakeholders in the agric sector, that more often than not, graduates of agriculture lack the required knowledge of operating farm machinery, while in other cases, they are uninterested in engaging in practical work, considering it demeaning for their ‘graduate status’.
CALEB OJEWALE
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