The Group Managing Director of Flour Mills of Nigeria Plc, Mr. Paul Miyonmide Gbededo on Tuesday in Ibadan canvassed for an urgent review of the academic curriculum in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions with a view to making the graduates being produced by the institutions to be readily employable in the industry.
He made the call while speaking at the University of Ibadan Research and Development Fair code-named UI-Town Connect 2016, with the theme Research, Innovation and Community Service for Societal Transformation.
In his presentation titled "The Academic Portrait, Humanistic Values and the Human Resource Development in the Industry", Gbededo remarked that the need to review the academic curriculum in the tertiary institutions had become imperative "to ensure we do not turn out first class graduates who are lone rangers and lacking in teamwork."
He said: "The industry had been investing in management trainee schemes, which had been elongating in duration over the years, in response to how wide the gulf of humanistic gaps in our academically certified graduates are.
"The contents of such schemes have since shifted from three months induction to introduce our graduates to the industry and company policies, to three year programs that see to provide another graduate school curriculum to our already baked graduates.
"I therefore challenge the University of Ibadan, being the premier University in Nigeria, to commission a study to quantify the gap between the quality of graduates produced by our universities and the demand of the 21st century industry. The curriculum of the universities should then be reviewed to ensure the gaps are closed. The effort should not be one-off, rather, the study should be sustained to ensure that the volatile dynamics in the industry is proactively tackled, to avoid the development of such gaps in the future."
Also speaking in the same vein, the Vice Chairman of Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy (ISGPP), Dr. Tunji Olaopa emphasized the need to integrate multidisciplinary framework into the academic curriculum saying there is no one disciplinary framework in today’s world that has the capacity to address development problems all alone.
His words: "It is in this sense that the humanities must actively cultivate a town 7 gown relationship that brings practitioners – broadcasters, linguistic experts, literary personalities, sages, filmmakers, musicians and composers, traditional medical practitioners, poets, as well as those with one link or the other to policy issues – into active conversation with intellectuals. All these have implications for our curriculum and research interests."
The Chairperson of the University of Ibadan research and Development Fair 2016, Professor Olanike Adeyemo had earlier hinted that the Fair initiative aimed at bringing the town and the gown together, would henceforth be an annual pre-Convocation event in the University just as she noted that the institution was looking forward for Public Private Partnership (PPP) collaboration to further move the research innovations forward.
