By Prof. Modupe Adeola Adelabu
Deputy Governor,
Ekiti State,
Paper Delivered at the 3rd Distinguished Lecture of Joseph Ayo Babalola University, held on Tuesday, 21st January, 2014 at Joseph Ayo Babalola University, Ikeji-Arakeji, Osun State.
Introduction
I am truly honoured and pleased to be here today to deliver the 3rd Distinguished Lecture of this great and amiable citadel of learning – Joseph Ayo Babalola University (JABU), for which I am part of right from the planning stage and where I served as council member for the first four years. It is arguably the first entrepreneurial University in Nigeria and the topic of my lecture is largely informed by this.
History of Education in Nigeria
The present education curriculum at all levels in Nigeria could be traced to the history of education which in itself is the history of the colonial educational system. The socio-economic and political forces of the colonial era have interacted to chart the course of educational development in Nigeria.
Interestingly, before this era, the traditional education in the western part of Nigeria particularly among the Yorubas’ emphasized social responsibility, job orientation, political participation, spiritual and moral values (Fafunwa, 1974:15).
It is important to note however, that even in those far away periods, the traditional education got influenced by the prevailing social, political and economic situations and the available technology within the system. Even in those days the traditional education system focused on sustaining self-efficient and sufficient household economy. (Adelabu, 1990)
The history of western formal education is bound up in the history of Christian missionary pioneering evangelisation in Nigeria. Education per se was not the primary goal of the missionaries, it was auxiliary to it. It was for this reason that the curriculum was narrow consisting mainly of Arithmetic, Reading and Religion.
This type of education definitely had created a big gap between education, employment and skills development. Colonial educational policies were to boost colonial economy. Although it laid emphasis on agricultural training which could have been novel, but it was to secure a ready source of raw materials for the emerging colonial economy mainly British Industries.
This was based on the premise that it was cheaper if Nigerians were educated enough to serve as clerks, technicians and artisans. Economically, much would be saved with local labours than importing personnel from Europe. The people were actually not trained to become independent entrepreneurs. This was of little benefit both to the individuals and Nigerians. This type of education stayed with us till date and it has certainly not accommodated global educational and economic changes.
Globalisation and imperative for changes in educational policy making and implementation in Nigeria
Globalisation became a widespread concept in the 1990s (Giddens, 1990). The forces and characteristics of globalisation tend to have collapsed traditional boundaries among nations, regions and among ethnic divides. Globalisation embodies and exhibits trends and characteristics, which tends to de-emphasise the primacy of the traditional nation state while simultaneously accentuating the ascendancy of world-wide trends and tendencies. A proper view of globalisation within historical context is expected to seeAfrica and Nigeria in particular as playing a central role in the global dispersal of civilisation and modernisation and in playing critical role in world economy. But this has not been. Nigeria made its first attempt to enter the so-called atomic age in 1995 when the first ever Universal Primary Education (UPE) scheme was launched in Western Nigeria. It was premised on the fact that Nigeria’s Survival as a race in this atomic age will depend on our ability to initiate and our competence to implement bold schemes of political economic and educational advancement (Nigeria: Western Region Debate 1952, in Adelabu, 1990).
In 1976, both Federal Universal Primary Education (UPE) scheme and the National Policy on Education with a 6-3-3-4 structure of formal education were launched. The Universal Basic Education (UBE) scheme was launched to provide both primary and junior secondary education for all school-aged children. Major international development and patterns of influence with foreign states’ and multinational organisations’ assistance and pressure have heavily influenced the orientation of Nigeria’s UBE programme as well as the on-going Education for All (EFA) exercise. This historical review has pointed to the fact that Nigeria had consistently fashioned its educational policies to make the country relevant to developed economies and subsequently, through education, integrate it into the global economy.
Globalisation and imperatives for changes in school curriculum in Nigeria educational system
Globalisation symbolises a shift from monocultural approach to education to a multicultural approach with the attendant implication for changes in school curricula and attendant practices. Consequently, learning needs of all young people and adults are to be met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life skill programmes, hence the emphasis on Technical and Vocational Education (TVC) in the National Policy of Education (2003). The revolution in knowledge production, distribution and management perhaps implies the death of the traditional curriculum. The school curriculum must embody the complexity and vibrancy of Information Technology. This may also necessitate the emergence of curriculum models and education policies that emphasise interdisciplinary courses, open ended systems, Socratic dialogue, multidimensional assessment and multiculturalism (Boyer, 1991, 1995; Slattery, 1995).
Education Transformation
Transformation by itself means a profound radical change like metamorphosis or renewal. It could be perceived to also mean a ‘paradigm shift’ characterised by a radical change from the old situation to a new enhanced state. (Scherto Gill, 2006)
Transformation often comes out of energetic states, it needs not be just a one-of experience and it may happen more or less continuously along the course of our life.
Transformation education through entrepreneurship therefore may not be popular because as a progressive idea and change, it may be resisted, it may cause some form of discomforts or at times conflicts but to embark on this journey of educational transformation, there is need to take risks as it sets out into a space not hitherto known and it will also explore new ground and new experiences with a fresh understanding and a different way of thinking and perceiving.
For our nation and in particular for Ekiti State, where I presently serve, education through the present Government’s Agenda Four has been identified as a veritable tool for Human Capital Development. This is based on the fact that one of the potent factors that enhance the wealth of nations is that of human capital – the better a nation’s human capital, the higher the productive capacity and national well being. For Nigeria to accelerate its socio-economic development there is the deliberate need to focus attention on human capital development through regular interaction of planners, employers and builders of human capital to facilitate the process of meaningful national development (Awopegba, 2001).
For a meaningful education that will make our graduates employable and self-employed, it is high time our universities started taking a look at entrepreneurship education. Entrepreneurship education seeks to bridge the gap between education, employment and sustainable lifelong living. It is through entrepreneurship education that students are equipped with knowledge, skills and motivation to encourage entrepreneurship success in a variety of settings.
This type of education is very dynamic and because it is a process that changes according to the changes in the surrounding society, it involves a whole range of aptitude like innovativeness, capacity to take risk and forecast prospect of an enterprise and confidence in one’s ability to meet unforeseen adverse situation or marked use of competencies in business. Thus entrepreneurship is the personal quality that enables people to start a new business or vigorously and innovatively expand an existing one, thereby maintaining and vitalizing the growth of an economy. Individuals with this background of education would have the competence, willingness and ability to seek investment opportunity in their environment and be able to establish and run an enterprise successfully based on the identified opportunities. This position could be said to have an economic and managerial perspective.
It is expected that our educational institutions will become centres for inculcating the spirit of entrepreneurship rather than the spirit of passing examinations to get white collar jobs. The best way to do this is to create a curriculum that is all-encompassing in developing that spirit and culture of entrepreneurship in the youth through educational programmes in universities and other institutions of higher learning. Globally, the current thinking is that university education should develop in the beneficiary a certain number of generic skills to a level that will ensure the continued creative productivity of the individual which Joseph Ayo Babalola University is championing as the First Entrepreneurial University in the country. The skills to be developed through entrepreneurship education according to Obanya (2002) include:
Analytical power: an advanced capacity for logical reasoning, employing appropriate verbal, quantitative, graphic, documentary, audio- visual, sensory- perceptions and a wide variety of tools
Communication: oral and written as well (as in other possible forms) using the appropriate language and non-verbal forms in specific situations to achieve specific objectives.
Problem-solving: the ability to task one’s analytical power to the maximum in developing possible solution paths to problem in a variety of situations, Team spirit: the ability to contribute meaningfully to group activities in a wide variety of forms, to relate with others to get out of one’s shell while remaining oneself.
Creativity: the ability to go beyond the well-trodden path, in thinking as well as in action.
Versatility: a broadened horizon in terms of domains of knowledge and competence. IT (information technology) as a discipline in its own right, as a tool for and support to other disciplines and life activities.
Life-long learning skills: perseverance, risk-taking, a spirit of enquiry, reading as a habit, self- directed learning efforts and the activities to face challenges, etc.
The major attraction of these generic skills is that they are transversal in nature, and can help to break the artificial barriers among disciplines. What is more, the rapid obsolescence of factual knowledge is taken care of, as the emphasis is on the tools and methods of learning; not on mere memorization and regurgitation. These skills are really the attributes, traits and behaviours that endure and which are transversal. Unfortunately, experience has shown that these skills are either no longer in significant quantity in our graduates or completely non-existent in some.
What went wrong?
Several reasons have been adduced why education in the country is unable to produce a critical mass of individuals with these core or generic skills. The bottom-line is that certain socio-political-economic factors have combined to incapacitate university education, as manifested in certain institutional problems. These according to Ogunyemi (2001) are:
Unplanned expansion, leading to a very rapid increase in the number of institutions since 1995.
Unnecessary duplication of courses and programmes; Deterioration of physical facilities; a near absolute lack of teaching- learning and research facilities; over-stretching of teaching, research and managerial capacities; an upsurge of various forms of social ills: examination malpractices, falsification of certificate, cultism and commercialization of the entire system; Universities struggling for avenues for extra income, often tend to rubbish the cherished academic traditions; Internal and external personal haemorrhage among the intellectual class; and loss of faith in the entire system.
The current academic curriculum prepares recipients with little or no job related content, while entrepreneurship education includes a wide range of subjects with work-based content. Unemployment is rampant in Nigeria like other nations because of mismatch between the need of employers and stock of job-specific human capital produced by educational training institutions (Simkovic, 2012). While graduates complain of high levels of unemployment, employers on the other hand, complain that the graduates are poorly prepared and therefore unemployable. Every organisation need to employ quality human capital for the purpose of repositioning their organisations for good. This is because “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do”(Baker, 2006).
In many cases, most employers compensate for insufficient academic preparations by organizing trainings and remedial courses for new employees. These steps ultimately increase the company’s operating cost and reduce their profitability margin and market competitive ability. Where companies cannot afford to take the risk of training new employees because of high operational cost and the fear of losing a trained employee, they simply source for available, suitable candidates overseas.
To douse the rising wave of mediocrity in the country, there is the need for good and quality education to reduce the risk of unemployment, improve productivity, increase wages, increase technological innovation and economic growth (Simkovic, 2012).This is why, the need to introduce entrepreneurship education in Nigerian Institutions. By this, individuals will be adequately equipped with the ability to recognize commercial opportunities and the knowledge, skills and attitudes to act on them.
Generally, the purpose of a university education, from the point of view of both the university and the individual student among others is to train and prepare young people for their future vocational activity, which may bring them into close contact with commercial or social enterprise. In other words, at the family and individual levels, a university education is to enable the beneficiary to have a good and sustainable employment. In the immediate past, that has been the case of university graduates in various professions. However, in the wake of rapid growth in the number of universities in Nigeria, and the global market competition experienced by employers of labour, there is urgent need to re-engineer our educational curriculum to make it truly functional.
Re-engineering University Education
Re-engineering university education is the technical application of the re-thinking process. As earlier mentioned, attempt must be made to break new grounds, by moving away from well-trodden paths, in this case, education for white collar jobs and a rigid curriculum that fits into it.
Re-engineering university education in Nigeria would require a strong emphasis on curriculum enrichment which would involve the following: modification of existing course content (sometimes in response to employer’ssuggestions), the introduction of new courses, the introduction of new teaching methods, and expanded provision of opportunities for work experience -all intended to enhance the development of employability skills and/or ensure that the acquisition of such skills is made more explicit. (Obanya, 2002)
Entrepreneurship Education in Higher Institutions
In the developed countries like United Kingdom (UK)and United States of America (USA), many Universities are already offering an impressive and sophisticated array of entrepreneurship activities. Incidentally this cuts across all disciplines. It also implies that entrepreneurship activities could be part of the curriculum of every discipline.
Entrepreneurship education has been embraced by almost all the developed countries and its capabilities and efficacy in springing up economies is not in doubt. It is believed that refocusing education system will immensely contribute in developing the spirit and culture of entrepreneurship in the country. The methodology here involves review of the current situation especially the existing education policies and highlights the need for departure by studying some models that can be applied. It was discovered that the current education system is deficient in providing the necessary impetus for development. It has also been found out that same problems keep escalating despite various efforts by the government to review policies and programmes in the past.
The incidence of Poverty in Nigeria is on the high side, where 70 percent of the total population has been classified as poor (Ewhrudjakpor, 2008). This rate of poverty is however accentuated by the increasing rate of unemployment, high level of illiteracy, corruption and bad governance among others. Therefore, as a panacea to this problem, entrepreneurship has been identified as a means of providing employment and income generation in the country.
Education should be a veritable tool for securing employment and emancipation of people through the provision and acquiring of necessary knowledge and skills to make lives more flourishing.
Challenges facing Entrepreneurship Education in Nigeria
The challenges facing entrepreneurship education in Nigeria are multi-faceted. The first is that entrepreneurship education curriculum is ineffectively implemented hence the difficulty in achieving its goals (Garba, 2004) neither could its curriculum objectives like other specialised education been translated into practical realities at the implementation stage for the benefits of learners (Okebukola, 2004, Onyeachu, 2008)
The second challenge facing entrepreneurship education in meeting its policy goals is traceable to lateness in starting entrepreneurship education at any level in Nigeria. This is premised on the argument that introduction of anything new in human society takes time to develop. Available facts in the literature indicate that United States of America introduced entrepreneurship into the curriculum of higher education as far back as 1947 (Kuratko, 2003). In the early 2000, the number of tertiary institutions that mounted entrepreneurship programme increased to 1,050 schools, as against 300 in the 1980s (Solomon, et al., 1994;Kuratko, 2003).
Another key challenge stifling the growth of entrepreneurship education is dearth of lecturers in the field of entrepreneurship to make the course practically interesting and goal-oriented as opposed to too much focus on theoretical instructions and the commonly use of traditional talk-chalk method of communicating knowledge and information as well as rote learning. According to Ajibola (2008), this form of instruction and learning hampers creativity and does little to equip students with problem-solving and decision-making skills
Deficiency of instructional materials such as textbooks and others could also be a challenge at the tertiary institutions in Nigeria. If there is absence of standard learning materials/text-books on entrepreneurship education, students would have no option other than to fall back on scanty hand-outs/training manuals made available by course instructors. Moreover, if functional infrastructures are not available in the schools, entrepreneurship education will not be effectively implemented and the goal of equipping the youths with skills and knowledge of trades will not be achieved.
Entrepreneurship education requires the use of active learning methods that place the learners at the centre of educational process and enable them to take responsibility for their learning. Such methods have been known to make learning experiences richer and to have positive benefits for students in terms of improving their motivation with positive effects on their engagement with learning and long-term attainment.
Poor funding of entrepreneurship education in particular and the education sector in general has been a serious challenge to entrepreneurship, both at the institutional level and the nation at large. This funding constraint has adversely affected the implementation of entrepreneurship education curricula, a fact attested to by National Universities Commission and counterpart supervisory agencies (Gabadeen&Raimi, 2012).
Lack of adequate orientation and sensitisation of students in our tertiary institutions can cause a dis-interest in entrepreneurship education, resulting in wrong mind-set and very weak participation in entrepreneurship activities.
Equally, unpleasant feedback from preceding self-employed graduates sends wrong signals to undergraduates taking compulsory courses in entrepreneurship education in several tertiary institutions (Gabadeen&Raimi, 2012). Some of the negative feedbacks from self-employed individuals to those still in school include: multiple taxes, harsh business regulations, inadequate infrastructure facilities for small businesses, high rate of inflation, labour regulations and stringent laws on starting/ running a business (Kisunkoet. al, 1999)
Other challenges are lack of access to bank credits, lack of government interest in promoting small businesses, poor state of infrastructural facilities and poor telecommunication system, epileptic electricity, corruption and fraud such that will discourage investors.
Entrepreneurship: A Strategy for Sustainable National Transformation:
No country can move forward technologically, industrially and economically without developing strong private partner initiate in the creation of wealth, poverty reduction and employment generation, with required skills. These skills include managerial, comparative, communication, technical, human and special skills to cope with the challenges of the future. Since entrepreneurship is vital to the sustainable advancement of any nation, entrepreneurship thus:
Serves as learning and training centres for the translation of dreams and ideas into successful ventures;
Facilitates the identification, creation and utilization of non-existent saving; Brings self-fulfilment; Checks Rural-Urban drifts; Alleviates and eradicates poverty; Creates employment.
Leads to technological advancement; Creates more jobs per unit of invested capital and per unit of energy consumed;
Mobilizes resources that ordinarily would have remained idle in the hands of people and employ them productively and by doing so, capital formulation is encouraged; Strengthens locally produced product for perfect competition;
Links up the various sectors of the economy and constitute the market for agricultural extractive and industrial output as well as providing source of material and labour input for big industries; Builds skills such as managerial, human, technical and conceptual skills in the individuals by teaching and allowing them to start businesses with little or no money for themselves; Reduces poverty and idleness; Attracts Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Investors will flood the economy, which will move the nation towards industrialization (Akpomi, 2009).
The role of entrepreneurship in national transformation globally as experienced in many countries of the world, mostly the Asian continent such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan and India, shows that entrepreneurship contributes substantially to national development. In Nigeria, where poverty is on the high side, this actually presents a persuading factor.
Industrialization strategy can mostly be a way of inducing entrepreneurship development. Our society is not static; it keeps changing. In the past, graduates in Nigeria had the problem of choosing among the various opportunities waiting for them. Then possession of a good certificate was synonymous with obtaining a very attractive white collar job. But today, the story has tremendously changed, there is a high rate of unemployed and employable youths in Nigeria despite Governments investment in education; perhaps the investment has been on wrong form of education.
Despite having been independent since 1960, Nigeria is one of the nations with highest rate of unemployed youths in the world (UNESCO and ILO, 2006). Nigeria‘s economy is still crawling because the education system has, over the time, failed to address the issue of human capital development. In other words, Nigeria is yet to join the league of countries that have used entrepreneurship education to drive their economies and overcome mass poverty as has been done in other developing Nations such as United Kingdom, United State of America, Scandinavian Nations and even some African countries like Egypt and Tunisia have been teaching entrepreneurship education in their school systems and have all produced specific and separate national entrepreneurship education strategic documents as their programmes are dovetailed into their national development plans (Chukwuma, 2006).
Globalisation necessitates that irrespective of country, having the right mix of knowledge and skills is now critical for young people, especially those living in rural and urban areas. Those without any employable skills, out dated skills or low skills are more likely to miss out on opportunities in the economic and social mainstream of their communities (UNESCO and ILO, 2006).
Recommendations
In the light of the crucial issues discussed and associated challenges highlighted above, the under listed prescriptions are for implementation by policy-makers.
Entrepreneurship education should be incorporated into the curricula of secondary schools and tertiary institutions and made compulsory because many might find themselves self-employed after school. This will help shift the youth from being job seekers to job creators and also from social dependence to self-sufficient people, since there are too many people with certificates but no clue as to what to do with their lives.
Vocational and technical education should be introduced at all levels of education. It is an indisputable means of reducing youth unemployment since it is skilled-oriented and employment motivated.
Career guidance services should be made compulsory and provided for all levels of education to help students in making realistic career choices. The efficiency of any career guidance effort will be dramatically enhanced if it begins early in life and becomes a way of thinking.
In our universities, many undergraduates are clueless as regards what they really want to study; others are studying courses that they are not passionate about, sometimes, because their friends talked them into it or their parents forced it upon them. Most times, these students choose these courses because they were given inadequate or no advice before they did so.
Another way to tackle this menace is to revisit the departmental syllabuses which are usually filled with irrelevant and out-dated courses. The government should furnish universities with the needed basic and academic amenities. A glimpse into a Nigerian university will reveal lots of inadequacies both academicals and infrastructural; the laboratories, better described as dumping rooms, are full of cobwebs sleeping with out-dated and unusable equipment. The lecture halls are dilapidated and most of them cannot even accommodate the number of students admitted. Some students help themselves by sitting on the floors.
The Vice Chancellors, Rectors and Provost overseeing the affairs of the universities, polytechnics and colleges of education respectively should ensure that course instructors/lecturers assigned to teach entrepreneurship education are specialists in the field. However, where there are difficulties in getting experts, non-specialists lecturers with relevant background in academia should be engaged and sent for accelerated training within and outside Nigeria.
Experts with practical experience in entrepreneurship from the industry could also be engaged on full or part-time arrangement.
In order to enrich the curriculum of entrepreneurship, the tertiary institutions offering entrepreneurship education should organize periodic field trips, industrial tours to developed nations, mentorship programme, hosting of exhibitions/fairs, coaching/grooming, seminars/conferences/workshops and exchange programmes in order to inspire undergraduate students and learners to imbibe entrepreneurial traits.
There is the need for periodic review and assessment of the contents of the entrepreneurship education curricula. The school curriculum should be pragmatic, that is, inculcate in the undergraduate students practical enterprise-building skills which should be turned into viable business opportunities during and after graduations, thereby reducing youth unemployment in Nigeria.
National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme should be refocused as a period for acquisition of Entrepreneurship skills and implementation of those skills during the service year. After passing out, it is expected that the trainees will establish personal businesses.
The Federal government should evolve a national culture of entrepreneurship by supporting, training and rewarding self-reliant graduates across the tertiary levels in Nigeria. This approach would help foster among students offering entrepreneurship innovation, invention and creativity.
The government should refocus Education Trust Fund (ETF), Petroleum Development Trust Fund (PTDF) and Federal Ministry of Education (FME) to earmark substantial portion of their budget for funding public universities/polytechnic and colleges of education offering entrepreneurship education courses. The funding should cover training, research, infrastructural development and programmes for academic and administrative members of staff in charge of entrepreneurship education across the three levels of tertiary institutions.
The various micro-finance banks should be alive to their obligations by providing the needed financial and advisory services to graduates and non- graduates that have pass through entrepreneurship education and who possess viable business plans and zeal of establishing innovative small-scale businesses.
Conclusion
The world is developing in an unprecedented speed and the rate of unemployment is growing fast which Nigeria is not able to cope with. Various sound economic programmes have been instituted by the Federal Government primarily to reduce poverty, unemployment and encourage entrepreneurship in Nigeria in the last three decades, yet none has worked. The real solution is mostly in our leaders and partly in the followers. We shall get result when we all think right, act right and take up challenges to develop entrepreneurship which, in turn, will lead to national transformation. Nigerian graduates should be encouraged that it is better to be a small head than to be a big tail. Hence, to be an employer of people is better than to be a servant, whether civil, public or modernized servant.
Graduates of higher education in Nigeria should not sit on the fence. With entrepreneurial education, the nation’s graduates will become employers of labour not job seekers. Their skills will enhance business expansion and reduce the level of poverty. The availability of white-collar jobs compared to the massive turnout of graduates from universities as well as the Nigeria Youth Service Corp (NYSC), shows a negative ratio. The available jobs cannot meet the needs of the over one hundred tertiary schools in Nigeria (Federal, States, Private Universities, Polytechnics, Colleges of Education, etc.).
However, in view of the dwindling national revenue the burden of educational matters cannot be shouldered by Government alone. Since the community and the private sector are equal stakeholder, there is need for all patriotic citizens, institutions, agencies and communities to support schools so as to make Entrepreneurship Education succeed in our schools. If Nigeria is to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, as well as become one of the world’s biggest economies in the world by the year 20:20:20, her entrepreneurship sector must receive adequate funding.