The scourge of unemployable graduates

Of all the ills plaguing Nigeria as a country, none is as serious as the current scourge of unemployable graduates whose horizon has continued to expand beyond imagination and now assuming an utterly frightening dimension.

In one breath, all the clamours the country is inundated with are about massive graduate unemployment and the urgent need for the government to wake up to its responsibilities of putting machineries in place to absorb them. In another breath however, the major complaints filtering in from employers of labour are now centred on the growing number of highly substandard products being released into the job markets by the various tertiary institutions.

In Nigeria, graduates are churned out in their thousands annually by all the higher institutions which number almost exceed those of the students seeking admission! And then quite as expected in an atmosphere where standard is sacrificed, the preponderance of unemployable graduates has gradually become a contending factor Nigeria has to grapple with.

If the truth be told, the general ignominy now staring everyone in the face can be attributed to years of national indulgence in external examinations firmly rooted in clandestine malpractices and now Nigeria’s chicken have come home to roost. The process of admitting candidates into the various tertiary institutions has been greatly compromised on one side, and the nation’s Joint Admission And Matriculation Board can also never be exonerated in the rot that higher institutions continue to face. The introduction of some stringent criteria for admission of candidates has for years heightened the rate of malpractices as both the public and private secondary schools struggle hard to meet up.

In times past, everything a candidate needs for admission into tertiary institutions were a minimum of simple five credits including English language and Mathematics. Even for most of the early years, it was even only those in the sciences- based courses that actually needed to have credit in Mathematics while ordinary pass in English language was accepted. Also for those in the humanities credit in English language and a simple pass in Mathematics were the major requirements. Yet, with such simple admission requirements, people graduating from universities at the time were very good and openly marketable.

Whatever informed a new wave of questionable criteria by JAMB is what is difficult to understand. Why for insurance must a candidate seeking admission have distinctions in the O’’ level subjects in order to enhance his points in addition to his JAMB scores before admission is guaranteed?

These stringent admission requirements are at the very root of all the sharp practices being perpetrated in all external examinations in Nigeria. There are many special centres scattered all over the country which activities are suspicious and ought to be dismantled because their existence is an ill wind that would bring no country any good.

The consequences of the various malpractices overlooked for decades are what Nigeria is facing currently. As many undeserving students are assisted to obtain the necessary grades for admission through hook and crook, the rush for higher education is intensified thereby leading to the proliferation of higher institutions and then the churning out of all manners of extremely poor products.

These ever-increasing institutions obviously hardly take into cognisance the near absence of employment outlets for their finished products owing to the lack of will by successive governments to invest in massive employment drive that can withstand the large turnouts of the graduates. Besides, it also seems as if the only motive of establishing most of the schools are profit-based, and not necessarily about the issue of adequate facilities that can guarantee standard products.

For the public universities, decades of failure of the federal government to invest adequate funds has resulted in over stretching of the existing facilities with the results that most of those institutions can only now boast of their past glory while their current records are better left in the dark because any searchlights beamed on them will only be tantamount to a nation washing its dirty linen in the public!

From the very chaotic situation where the hostel facilities have become grossly inadequate, lecture theaters no longer different from refugee camps, and lecturers themselves prefer embarking on industrial actions to addressing the challenges and then insisting on getting paid for work not done, Nigeria can only delude itself by thinking it would ever get the best out its public universities. And in order to avoid the eyesore that public universities have become, most parents who can afford it have always opted for the private institutions where there still exist some modicum of decency and order even if they have to pay through their noses.

Yet, most of those private schools with very few exceptions still face the challenges of inadequate facilities and manpower. In most cases, a good number of their staffs are still those who shuttle between different schools and can therefore hardly give their best. At the same time, most of those to be categorised as their permanent staff hardly have the requisite experience needed to achieve optimal outcomes due to lack of exposure. Under all these prevailing backgrounds, anyone expecting best products from the institutions must be living in a fool’s paradise.

It’s no wonder then that all manner of graduates now roam the streets ostensibly searching for jobs which interviews they can never even pass in the first place. The situation is so bad that many supposed graduates cannot put two correct sentences together. The most worrisome aspect of it all is how Nigeria will be able to secure adequate personnel to man all its ministries and parastatals with the increasing wave off unemployable graduates being released to the job markets by tertiary institutions.

The way forward is for the country to return to the drawing board. Whatever strategies would be required, Nigeria must rid all its examinations of any form of malpractice. Candidates being fed into higher institutions must be the truly best candidates in order to halt the trending culture of garbage in garbage out.

Oyewusi, retired Director of Education is also the Coordinator of Ethics Watch International, Lagos.