Why Nigerian entrepreneurship is a scam and a multiplier of poverty (2)
A graduate turned shoemaker due to unemployment rate in Nigeria
Editor's note: Olajire Philip,
the NAIJ.com partner blogger, in the concluding part of this article,
explains why Nigerian entrepreneurship is a scam and a multiplier of
poverty. He also says that entrepreneurship and vocational education
was postulated because of the inability of successive governments to
provide jobs for fresh graduates.
Entrepreneurship
is the only solution being utilised by successive administrations to
tackle the problem of mass unemployment. Entrepreneurship in Nigeria is
scam, an inherent failure because it has failed to create jobs while it
has also handicapped our graduates and youths from creating jobs.
Firstly,
why are graduates being persuaded into vocational education and
entrepreneurship? The reason graduates are told to engage in
entrepreneurship (businesses as making pop-corn, liquid soap, plantain
chips, cakes and so on) is not that there are no jobs; it is because
graduates are poorly educated to create jobs.
Consider a typical electrical engineering graduate
of a Nigerian university/polytechnic, who has adequate
classroom/theoretical training but lacks requisite practical training,
would find it difficult securing a job that needs practical experiences
in electrical engineering. Likewise, he will find it almost impossible
to set up an electrical engineering business.
However,
the difficulty in securing job opportunities as well as job creation is
not only limited to electrical engineers, it is a fact that graduates
of other courses are not left out in this precarious situation.
The electrical engineering graduates are
supposed to be in the fore-front of design and manufacturing of solar
panels, electricity generation turbines, transformers and other power
generation, transmission and distribution facilities to help solve the
power problem in Nigeria.
Unfortunately, the
typical Nigerian electrical engineering graduate went to a campus
blessed with empty labs and obsolete workshops, so how could he have
acquired practical skills to invent, innovate or replicate?
Employers
don't make things easy for the fresh graduate because it is being
required of him to have about five years working experience before he
could get employed. As a result of the inability of successive
governments to provide jobs for fresh graduates, entrepreneurship and
vocational education was postulated. So, the electrical engineering
graduate starts thinking of how to become an entrepreneur in car wash,
frying akara, hair dressing, and laundry and so on. What an aberration!
At this juncture, I have categorised the types of entrepreneurs that exists in the world into four.
1. Capital entrepreneurs
They
are people with capital to invest in any kind of business they love.
Many are into importation of finished goods while some are into
manufacturing and service provision. Some are 'Dangote-like', because
they employ expatriates as well as import machines to set up large
companies. They 'sometimes' invest in research (especially in developed
countries) in order to have innovative products.
2. Conditional Entrepreneurs
They
are people who became overnight entrepreneurs due to unemployment,
profiteering and availability of extra income. They are mostly novices
when it comes to entrepreneurship. This is the category our graduates
belong, as they are being forced to acquire vocational skills because
the government has no job for them.
3. Innovative entrepreneurs
They
are products of qualitative education as well as research in science
and technology. They make prototype products, form enterprises by
commercialising their products, later grow them into large scale
ventures. Microsoft Corporation, General Electric and Facebook are few
examples of innovative entrepreneurship.
4. Traditional entrepreneurs
These
are the entrepreneurs we have always been having around, such as
restaurants, retailers, taxi, drivers, bricklayers, event decorators,
bakers, carpenters and mechanics. Only few small scale entrepreneurship
of these kind of do grow into medium ones. No nation has ever achieved
development by laying emphasis on this type of entrepreneurship.
Capital
entrepreneurship as well as enormous investment in innovative
entrepreneurship is the two major focuses of nations that have achieved
rapid development. Nigeria spends so much on the development of
traditional and conditional entrepreneurship but has totally neglected
the development of innovative entrepreneurs. This is why poverty and
unemployment is being multiplied in Nigeria. Capital entrepreneurs are
so few in Nigeria, so their impact on the economy is very limited.
Entrepreneurship
is a failed remedy. A remedy provided for unemployed graduates after
they have spent many years in the higher institutions without having job
creation capabilities. Graduates don't need monies to be turned
chin-chin and pop-corn entrepreneurs overnight, they needed the monies
for intensive trainings, highly equipped laboratories and workshop while
as undergraduates.
The present fall in the
value of naira is basically a problem caused by the types of
entrepreneurship we practice. The major foreign exchange earner Nigeria
has is crude oil, but capital entrepreneurs import almost every other
item, even items produced locally in large quantities, such as
toothpaste, shoes, palm oil, drinks and furniture.
For
example, if Nigeria earned 1000 dollars daily when crude oil was sold
at about 100dollars per barrel in 2013, entrepreneurs made demand of
goods worth 500 dollars same day, no items they needed to import.
But Nigerians now earns 400 dollars daily in 2016 when crude oil sells
for 40 dollars per barrel and dollar demand for importation remains the
same. It is practically impossible for the government to release the
whole income for importation. So this results in scarcity of the dollar
which culminates into attempt to devalue the naira.
Undergraduates studying agricultural
courses should be empowered (both with finance and modern implements) to
own farms before and after graduation. I believe funding of our
agriculture student/graduates is possible since the government can pay
huge sums to medical students during their internships.
We
need to fix the graduates of agriculture into our agricultural sector,
as in people who can access information, modern tools and techniques for
abundant job production as it is done in advanced countries.
Finally, with my years of active engineering
practice, all I can see is that tackling the problems of unemployment
and poverty may be difficult unless there is a paradigm shift in our job
creation approach from having more traditional and conditional
entrepreneurs to turning our graduates into innovative entrepreneurs.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the editorial policy of NAIJ.com.
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