Entrepreneurial studies in varsities
By Sun News
Tuesday, June 27, 2006

The National Universities Commission (NUC) recently announced a plan to tackle the challenge of Nigeria’s shrinking employment market for university graduates with the introduction of compulsory entrepreneurial studies for all undergraduate courses in Nigerian universities from the 2007/2008 session.
The objective is to equip our university graduates with the knowledge and skills required to set up and manage small scale businesses.

The NUC, in its weekly memorandum, signed by its Executive Secretary, Professor Peter Okebukola, said the policy will address the problem of dwindling public offer of jobs, by providing training for self-employment which is emerging as a viable option in Nigeria. The initiative, according to the memo, is based on an opinion poll of youth corps members which indicated that 96 per cent of the respondents support the move.

We endorse this policy of the NUC which is well within its purview as the regulatory authority of Nigerian universities. The implementation of this visionary plan will afford Nigeria’s teeming university students the opportunity of training in the basics of small scale business management, and offer them an option, outside Nigeria’s unfriendly job market.

The downturn in the Nigerian economy, with its attendant deleterious effect on virtually all sectors of life, has, over the years, occasioned a shrinking of employment opportunities and produced an army of educated but unemployed and frustrated youths.

The move to teach the present generation of Nigerians university students to set up and run small scale businesses of their own will therefore prepare them for the challenge of positively impacting on the Nigerian economy, and empower them to make a living for themselves.

We urge the NUC to immediately kickstart the processes which will bring this laudable vision to fruition. It is salutary that some universities have, without any prompting, already introduced compulsory entrepreneurial studies for all their undergraduate courses. We enjoin those who are yet to start to quickly embrace this new direction.

We hasten to point out, however, that training students on how to establish and manage small businesses should not detract from the responsibility of the government, at all levels, to strengthen the capacity of the Nigerian job market to absorb our university graduates.

The management of small scale businesses, we must say, has its own problems and limitations in Nigeria, especially in the face of inadequate infrastructure, limited access to funding and, most importantly, epileptic energy supply which has become the bane of the industrial sector.

The government has a duty to live up to its responsibility of providing an enabling environment for entrepreneurship, both for the present business owners and the ones to be pushed into the economy as a result of this commendable NUC policy.