Human capital agenda for Nigeria

As politicians traverse the country gerrymandering, one trend is glaringly visible – the absence of any strategic plan for the development of required human capital for sustainable growth and development. Possibly, this critical aspect in development would be left to chance or prayers in accordance with our evolving attitude to important matters in the country.

But no nation stumbles into any sustainable state of development or, put more clearly, no industrialised nation has ever emerged by chance without a strategic human capital development plan. In the last century, the typical example of Japan can be cited. Once in the backyard of industrial development, Japan from the second half of the 19th century charted a sustainable course for its industrial transformation by investing much in terms of plans and implementation of education and skills acquisition so that the country could quickly catch up with the West. The success of Japan in industrial development is now legendary.

The launch of Nigeria’s Industrial Revolution Plan in 2014, even though belated, is, however, commendable. Yet, for a plan that targets to make Nigeria “the preferred manufacturing hub in Africa”; that seeks to deliver the country from continually remaining an exporter of raw unprocessed materials into becoming an industrial giant that produces value-added manufactures for export, the absence of a strategic human capital development plan in the whole agenda is most unfortunate.

Research has shown that many countries that continue to play actively in the raw materials exports market without a developed manufacturing sector significantly lack highly skilled workers with requisite industrial skills that are of global standards. For a country to emerge steadily into the industrial club, there has to be a deliberate investment into the creation of a human capital base that will drive the industrial process. It is not surprising that over 50 percent of Nigeria’s imports still come from manufactured goods.

The much-vaunted National Automotive Policy that seeks to produce Nigerian cars is also bereft of any conscious plan to generate local technical expertise to drive this process at a scale that is significant. We cannot continue to always put the cart before the horse. The emergence of India in the last two decades as a software hub in the world did not occur by wish or plans that remain perpetually as documents but by a deliberate implementation of a skills development and support framework.

The political leadership and class in Nigeria seem not to be yet ready to transform the country into an industrial nation. When they are ready, we will begin to see proper assessment of skills needs for industrial development, appropriate investment in education and skills acquisition through a robust interface between policymakers, education authorities at all levels – primary, secondary, tertiary, technical/vocational – and realistic timelines for the achievement of competence and adequacy in certain skill areas.

It is true that Nigeria is experiencing a youth bulge that provides a demographic advantage in the context of a leadership that will create a dependable human capital base from this. But the failure to make this demographic index become a dividend has shown in the continual “export” of youths to other climes that have realistic human capital development frameworks.

Let our political class begin to re-think development, as it is a process that is holistic, strategic and can only take place with conscious pursuit.