South Korean Ambassador to Nigeria, Major General Lee In-Tae on Tuesday said his country had moved from being one of the poorest in the world to the 11th in terms of GDP and eight in export due to the emphasis it placed on research and education.
Ambassador Lee In-Tea, who spoke at a public lecture at the University of Jos in a paper titled: “Growing the Nigerian Economy through Education: The South Korean Model”, said Nigeria could do same to overcome its challenges.
He said after 35 years of colonialism by Japan and three years of war between 1950 and 1951, his country was in ruined but had moved to simple manufacturing to heavy industry and now ICT.
“From the year 2000, Korean high tech firms had outperformed Japanese firms especially in areas of television, phones and memory productions. There is a relationship between education and economic development. Korea has a 92 percent High school graduation with a 3.7 percent unemployment rate and 9.4 percent youth unemployment level,” he said.
He called for improvement in university research adding that, “it will lead to high quality human resources as well as national economic development. Nigeria will achieve great national development by investing in education through adequate funding.”
Earlier the Vice Chancellor of University of Jos, Professor Seiddi Sebastian Maimako said the institution had in 2017 requested a vocational training centre from the South Korean government adding that, “we have been working on that collaboration and we have now added our request to collaborate with the South Korean University for National Sports to establish an institute of sports in the University of Jos.”
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