President Muhammadu Buhari has urged universities in the country to focus their attention on making Nigerian graduates employable.
The president said this while speaking at the 31st convocation of the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Ondo state, on Saturday.
Buhari, who was represented by Suleiman Yusuf, the deputy executive secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC) said it was worrisome that Nigerian graduates are always described as unemployable by employers of labour.
He said, “In today’s globalised knowledge economy in which the wealth, strategic importance and ranking of any country in the comity of nations is determined largely by its knowledge economy index, my expectation is that our universities will use the instrumentality of their tripartite mandates of teaching, research and community engagement to launch Nigeria into an enviable position among nations of the world. ”
“In this regard, the government expects Nigerian universities to produce graduates imbued with the requisite knowledge, competencies, attitudes, and skills to be active role players in our quest for socio-economic and technological development.
“I expect universities to pay serious attention to the less than complimentary assessment of the graduates of our universities by employers of labour. Definitely, we cannot be comfortable when products of our citadels of learning are being described as ‘unemployable’, exhibiting lack of job-readiness and so on.”
