Insecurity, poor power supply, transportation infrastructure endanger job creation —KWASU VC

The President Muhammadu Buhari-led APC government often lists job creation among its numerous achievements in the last six years of governing Nigeria. However, the figure of the unemployed in the country seems increasingly scarier. Baring his mind on the subject matter, the Vice Chancellor of Kwara State University (KWASU), Professor Muhammed Mustapha Akanbi, SAN, in this interview with CHRISTIAN APPOLOS, advised that provision of adequate security, stable electricity power supply and sustainable road/transportation infrastructure, should be government’s best plan to tackling the skyrocketing rate of unemployment in the country.

Unemployment plays a major role among the challenges facing Nigeria, what should be the government’s best plan of action to solve the job scarcity crisis in the country.

Let me tell you, for the rate of unemployed persons in Nigeria to reduce, the government must give serious attention to some important areas and factors. Considering the present reality, the first one is insecurity. A man who cannot assess his business would start to look for government job. Imagine you have a farm and because of insecurity, you cannot assess your farm. The next thought on your mind would be to start looking for government job because you have needs and bills to pay.

Again, a young person that has received training to become an entrepreneur decides to go into agribusiness, the person will gladly give his best to doing the business if he knows that he and his farm produce are protected. Such a person would not go about looking for jobs. He will go into farming, and would eventually become a job creator and employ others. So without security, many aspects of our economy will be closing down and creating more people with no jobs.

Number two is road and transportation infrastructure. I was in Ibadan over the weekend, and it took me six hours from Ibadan to Ilorin. Imagine that I was moving goods from Ilorin to Ibadan. By the time I try it three times, I might pack up the business and move to Abuja to look for work. There are people who want to do business. As recently as 1998, I was lecturing and have a thriving law firm. But I used to go to Lagos from Ilorin almost every week to appear in court by road. Now, because of how terrible the roads are, if I have to do that, I have to take a flight and we all know the cost of flight. Again I will have to avoid the road because I don’t want to be kidnapped. So these are part of the things that kill entrepreneurship which everyone knows translates into job creation.

So the government has to provide access to road transportation, water transportation, air transportation, rail transportation. When people know they can safely move, they will be willing to go into various businesses even outside their state. Imagine if there is rail transportation from Ilorin to Malete, the location of Kwara State University, a lot of people will move to Malete to live and still go to work in Ilorin.

The third one is power. The cost of doing business in Nigeria in terms of electricity usage alone crumbles many viable businesses. I say this because I know how much Kwara State University spends on diesel. What we spend on diesel makes me ask myself; am I not better selling diesel.

If we don’t power the generating set, we can hardly get anything done. So imagine a young entrepreneur, somebody who runs a small and medium scale business and uses 80 per cent of his profit to power the business. When he runs out of money to sustain his business, he will pack it up and go to the nearest city and start looking for government work, or he will resort to a life of crime.

So the government must provide an enabling environment for businesses to thrive. I am not an economist but I can guarantee you that if the government provides security, transportation and power (electricity), 50 per cent of those working for others will leave and start their own businesses, and that will automatically translate into many job opportunities for Nigeria’s teeming unemployed youths.

It is said that KWASU prides itself as a university of community development and entrepreneurship. What are you doing to translate this entrepreneurship into job creation?

Yes. We hold the ace when it comes to entrepreneurship. For a young university, we have been able to shine the light in this area. We don’t want to produce students that will just be certificate-based or certificate-leading. We want to produce students who, when they graduate, would not go about looking for jobs; rather they should become job creators.

So we ensure that we introduce our students to our entrepreneurship unit. We also encourage them to register a business name, which so many of them do. The last I checked, we have registered over 18,000 of our students and ex-students at the Corporate Affairs Commission.

So if you come in and you’re studying let’s say History or Chemistry, what we do is to encourage and arm you with what we call entrepreneurship entrepreneurial skills. The idea is, if you don’t want to work with your B.Sc chemistry, you can decide to go into poultry. You can decide to go into soap making.

We ensure that our students are not going to be graduates that would become stranded, despite having a first class or having good honours. The plan is, you can graduate today with a first class in engineering or computer engineering, and decide to say no, no, I am going to look at the business side of engineering. No I am not even going to do anything about engineering, I am going to go into tailoring.

At the last alumni reunion we had, you will not believe the number of fashion designers of ex-KWASU students that turned up and were so celebrated. So, this is one area we will continue to put in more effort.

Another area I would want to add to it is what we call the professional development programmes that we do. When our students come in to study whatever course, we encourage them to also register for professional exams. Exams like ICAN, etc. So you could have someone reading Law, who has registered to start ICAN. By the time he or she is graduating, the person is likely to get his or her LLB and at the same time become a chartered accountant. We are doing all these so we can produce the total grandaunt, somebody who can play globally. We don’t want people who will be going about after graduation with CVs begging for jobs that are nowhere.