The 21st-century world is a world that is very different from the one human society has adapted to this far. It is a world that moves at the speed of light, and that dynamism will actively transmit itself along the full spectrum of our social realities. It is gratifying that this is a question that forms part of the consciousness of some of our politicians and that measures are being put in place to remedy the problem from the perspective of formal public institutions and their partners, but there is a pressing need for completion of that circuit – which is the conscious assimilation of this imperative by the society at the informal level.
Rapid advancement in technology has placed increasingly new demand – demands that the products of both our informal and formal education/skilling systems must serve. The world has not only moved forward but has also moved on and the future will not wait for anyone. The 21st century is unique and only people with a particular skill set that is sharp enough to deliver these “impossible” demands can survive.
Like pretty much the rest of the country, Kano is an eyesore of idling and rudderless young men and women wasting away at about the same speed more and more of them are being produced. One of the first strange things I noticed after moving to Kano is the sheer profusion of maternity clinics around the metropolis – they are everywhere you look! It was the type of shock that was enough to remain a shock even though one had always known that Kano is very densely populated.
I was once told that the three top hospitals in Kano – the Mallam Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, Murtala Muhammed Specialist Hospital and Abdullahi Wase Specialist Hospital – average about 1,000 live births daily which means that 3,000 new souls are added from those three sites alone every day. Basic competence in statistical sciences will then tell you that if you double that number, you might obtain a manageable estimate of the full picture of the population growth in Kano.
Given poor social and municipal services all over the country, especially in chaotic inner cities, you can also assume that the number of households who cannot afford healthcare or cannot access it, or both, should at least equal the number of those who can afford it, or can access it, or both. This is frightening, to say the least.
The rub is that unless we find a way to provide the sustenance and direction for this burgeoning population – we are in soup. They are out there every day taking away value instead of adding it. We must also realise that the reason we have so many of them with no meaningful livelihood is NOT because there are no livelihoods – it is because those young men and women lack the skills to actively participate in the labour market. There are indeed jobs and livelihoods alright. What we don’t have are the capable hands.
Everywhere I look in the same city, I am dumbfounded by the ubiquity of the Chinese, the Indian… the Lebanese, the Syrian and the Egyptian, and not forgetting the occasional American and his Five Eyes, some of whom are third-generation residents. They are here fixing everything from potholes to refineries; they are here building bridges, they are here in the few factories still alive, they are here managing hotels and running TV stations, they are out there in the cornfields, they are tending the rice paddies and the cattle ranches together with their value chains. Some are even here selling tomatoes – I kid you not!
There are jobs in Nigeria – enough to go around for everyone. Our problem is the skill gap. Rather than a deficit, it would seem like we have a surplus if we have to import labour to run our lives. This paradox not only typifies the scale of our loss of touch but actually also means we can make a turnaround in record time.
Skills are quite straightforward and much easier to impart than producing a ‘graduate’. They do not require the donkey years of all-round academic conditioning the Prussians had in mind while designing the current classroom-based architecture of our schooling system.
So, what can you do to help? You are actually in the best position to say, but here is the deal. The unique characteristics of the 21st century include a greater and far-reaching role for digital and communication technologies, combined with a bullish jet age that has effectively reduced the world into a global village.
Emphasis will be more on accuracy, competence, efficiency and effectiveness and all these are derivatives of a skills engineering framework that should go beyond the formal structure of the classroom into the informal world of social interactions.
These unique characteristics connect skills not only to employers of labour but directly to its consumers, eliminating all kinds of bottlenecks and red tape. All it takes at this point really, is a brain that knows what to look for, and how to act in reaction.
With this “operating system” installed in the psyches of a critical mass of our young men and women, a bullish industrialisation frenzy would have been initiated and sustained. Equipping youth and school leavers with technical and vocational skills for personal fulfilment and production of physical goods and services is no longer enough but linked with the demand for skills, demand for intellectual literacy, demand for discipline and demand for the specific application of knowledge will be the ingredient X of our odyssey.
To survive in a new, globally competitive world, today’s young men and women will need to be creative, have a great problem-solving imagination, have a passion for learning and be dedicated to a productive work ethic. Both students of the classroom and students of the street can develop these abilities through formal and informal instruction… meaning they can also learn it from you, if you were to plant the seeds of the idea in them, for instance.
The young men and women of Kano, of Nigeria are your neighbours, they are your daughters, they include the barista at your local mai shayi joint, they are the almajirai that do your chores, they are your followers on Twitter and they are also the distant faces you have observed from afar as they lived their lives around you. That’s something we can do.
What can you do for them?
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