Engineer Joseph Asuku Bello is the member representing Adavi/Okehi Federal Constituency of Kogi State. He recently sponsored a bill seeking to make vocational education compulsory in Nigerian secondary schools. In this interview, he spoke on the need for the bill among other issues.
Why the push for the passage of a bill to make vocational education compulsory in Nigerian secondary schools?
I had a premonition and belief that the way out for Nigeria is to inject a more practical approach to learning. No country will develop if it does not utilise its manpower towards entrepreneurship in schools than the pursuit of certificates aimed only at getting white-collar jobs.
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That was why I proposed the bill to provide an act that will make the teaching of vocational education a must be incorporated into the syllabus of our secondary schools.
My concern is that the growing unemployment among our population is alarming. The National Bureau of Statistics, as I stated while on the floor of the House had in the first quarter of 2020, said about 21.7 million Nigerians are unemployed out of which 13.9 million are youths. These figures are predicted to grow faster, especially with the current economic challenges brought about largely by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Do you see the bill as a move to transform the educational orientation in the country?
Yes, it is a good step. I believe, and many other people believe too, that the main reason for youths’ unemployment in the country is the faulty educational system from the lower levels which does not prepare the youths to be independent by learning vocational skills like woodwork, tailoring, catering, photography and other subjects.
So, the essence is to mainstream the study of vocational subjects in agriculture, automobile technology, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Electrical/Electronic into core the educational system from junior secondary to senior secondary school levels.
This will change the structure of these schools to become better skills acquisition centres which prepare our young people for self-employment.
There seems to be absence of the political will to transform the educational sector, do you think this bill will make any difference?
Our aim as a legislature is to provide Nigerians with a piece of legislation that will transform substantially our entire orientation to embrace an educational system that will make an individual more of a creative mind than having a person that has garbage in garbage out mentality.
We have been paying lip service to this for long. That was what obtained in the past.
Our Technical Secondary Schools were created to nurture the manpower skills from the lower levels. Unfortunately, all these efforts have been brought to a halt as everything put in place for the purpose was abandoned and our orientation changed.
That is the problem. So there is a need for a change of mind and orientation to put our youths back on track for self-reliance.
How do you think the programme can be implemented?
First, we want to make the teaching of Vocational Education compulsory in all private and public secondary schools in Nigeria.
We have proposed sanctions in sections 1 and 2 of the bill which will be meted out to defaulters. We also want to make it mandatory for all secondary schools’ graduates to obtain credit in at least one vocational subject as a condition to get admission into tertiary institutions.
Do you see vocational education enjoying greater acceptability in the near future?
Yes, the main aim is to use the legislation to have a robust system that will support government’s efforts to implement policies towards the National Vocational Education drive as well as training for manpower development.
As I said, this bill will make operators and other stakeholders in our educational system take vocational education more seriously and impart knowledge that will help Nigeria come out of the woods.
We need vocational education to move forward. This will ease the burden off agencies like the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) and Industrial Training Fund (ITF) because people already have skills from their formative education years, as against having adults with low skills who have to be trained by these agencies as adults who failed to get jobs.
We had many missteps in the past and that should not reoccur, especially with the present challenges facing us.
Insecurity is slowly crippling education, so there is a need to bring in reforms that will meet our challenges.
What made previous efforts to revamp the sector, especially the issue of vocational education, fail?
We had many systems of education aimed at making educational attainment better. The 6-3-3-4 system is the most popular which seeks to provide a linear, organised model that will equip Nigerians with a four-step education path from primary school to university.
However, in the course of implementing the system, many important aspects were overlooked and vocational education was relegated to the background.
A perception was created regarding vocational education as it was seen as knowledge for people who have no means to pursue education to tertiary level, or a vocation left for people with no deep western education.
It was also destroyed deliberately by killing our technical colleges as their workshops were vandalised and equipment stolen in many instances. This is the problem facing vocational education in the country.
We need to be useful to ourselves and the country by using our God-given talents. Education is not about a certificate; it is about how someone applies the knowledge to produce something tangible.
What about its applicability in tertiary institutions?
Though we have not proposed the teaching of vocations in tertiary education, it is to be strengthened. That will help us get engineers, ICT specialists, professional farmers and other graduates that will provide the professional workforce needed to drive our development drive.
The pathetic thing here is that, because of the lack of equipment in our universities and other tertiary institutions, most of the professional graduates do not have the practicals in what they were taught in those institutions.
So, if we want to move forward, we must have institutes that will further teach practical demonstrations of what is being taught in our universities.
What is your hope for the future of vocational education if the bill is passed?
My wish is to see the passage of the bill and the implementation of what it seeks to achieve. This needs our collective efforts. The first step is to have legal backing to the proposal which comes when the bill is passed into law. We have taken the steps and we will get to the destination.
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