Equipping the new generation of entrepreneurs with skills and funds
Nigerians are currently upbeat on the subject of entrepreneurship, no doubt. The signs of their determination to innovate and create are everywhere evident. In the very recent past, several events promoting the cause of entrepreneurship have been taking place every now and again. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), this week, announced its intension to strengthen its support to entrepreneurs. It proposes to give further support to those involved in the performing arts as well as MSMEs. We can therefore safely say that the people of Nigeria have woken up to the reality of modern economic life. While the people are increasingly realizing that government cannot do everything for them, government is willing to do even more. Essentially, the people have to do most things for themselves, under the protective shadows of the government, and within the universally acknowledged duties of government. That should be the basis of a forward looking and healthy socio-economic partnership between government and the people.
Indeed, government owes the people a lot of duty, in addition to the provision of increased access to finance for entrepreneurs. For instance, government is to secure the lives and property of the people. It is to provide them with the so-called enabling environment for the operation of their daily undertakings, including their businesses, big or small, and to facilitate the conduct of business. In this regard, government is to guarantee functional infrastructure, including healthcare facilities, educational curricula and institutions, effective criminal justice system and the rule of law. Although most African governments, not limited to those of Nigeria, have not been famous for their ability to discharge these duties, their failure has not in any way minimized the widely acclaimed principles on which the purpose of government rests – security of life and property and assurance of a conducive environment for legitimate human activity.
It is the responsibility of government to create new opportunities for those interested in taking the entrepreneurial route. And not just making them aware, it should also create incentives for them to appreciate in that way of life. The promotion of technical education and artisanry training is a fundamental function of government. It is to ensure the availability of adequately equipped technical and vocational training institutions, to support the development and growth of the fundamental technical manpower needed to support economic development. Part of the complaint against our current educational system is that it produces unemployable graduates. This notion may have some merit but it is fundamentally flawed because we are heaping the blame on the wrong quarters.
The thinking, which is obviously wrong, is that the universality system is to blame for the seeming incongruence between the output of the educational system and the requirements of commerce and industry. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The output of the universities is a product of the direction given to them by those running the system. Our educational system has lost the stratification that is needed to guarantee the production of the varied skill sets critical to a modern economy. Owing to the very warped reward system we operate, everybody wants a university degree for the name of it, especially in areas of least resistance – particularly in the arts and humanities – with little interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The fields of STEM have borne the brunt of the corrupt reward system in Nigeria, and no longer command the followership that is critical for national development and even national survival. When colleges of technology begin to specialize in arts and humanities with tangential attention to STEM, we know who to blame – those running the education bureaucracy. The universities and, indeed all educational systems, follow the curricula provided to them by the powers that be. If we set a direction, like focusing on technical skills, we must also be ready to provide the supporting institutions to produce the raw materials (intakes to the courses) for the areas and skills that are relevant to industry.
This also has implications for the calibre of faculty emplaced. At Pan Atlantic University there is adequate emphasis on the needs on industry. This has been a major index for faculty emplacement. Student internship, which is compulsory for almost all study areas, is a unique way of keeping tab on the needs of industry as feed backs help us to reform and restructure programmes to meet the needs of employers. The mix of faculty, blending high level corporate experience and academic excellence, ensures that faculty is up to speed with the reality outside the school gates.
The concept of enabling environment has been overused in Nigeria to the extent that it has become a mantra for politicians seeking electoral victories. However, it is a complex amalgam of all that is good in the operating environment. It begins with the rule of law, whereby justice is free and available to all. Enabling environment encompasses the removal of bottlenecks on the way of business transaction, such as delays created by corrupt public officials as a means of extorting money from the public. It presupposes timely response to enquiries at public institutions regarding, for example, registration of business, titles and such. It include the promulgation of living (as against dead-on-arrival law) that facilitate business, such as the Movable Asset or the Collateral Registry Law of 2017.
The challenge we face most of the time is that government deals with disabling challenges in a piecemeal fashion, and not on a continuous basis. The provision of water, for instance, in a location where insecurity is evident and electricity is epileptic may be a good effort on the part of government, but it does not relieve the entrepreneur of much of the environmental headaches he faces. Although problems sometimes have to be tackled in units and individually, especially under situations of limited resources, the solution to the next adjoining problem must be sought if the one already addressed is to be of any value. In other words, in our system in which most public facilities are lacking, we cannot successfully lay claim to enabling environment if we face the challenges in isolation. Providing one and leaving out the rest is sloppy and ineffective. The least we can do to be successful in this regard is to tackle the problems individually but on a continuous unbroken basis. This may be hindered by finance but as we all know, the problem of Nigeria is not lack of finance but the inability of those charged with the responsibility of managing our finances to effectively utilize what we have. The debate of this topic has long been settled.
However, no amount of enabling environment or provision of social overhead capital will take the place of the peoples’ capacity to think, as they say in business schools, out of the box. The people must accept that it is their duty and not of government to envision and think themselves out of the various challenges they confront. Therefore, the onus is substantially on the people to think, innovate and exercise their humanly possible capacity to advance the wellbeing of society. Nigerians appear to have woken up to this great challenge. We must therefore look again at our educational and training institutions, as well as our funding institutions and partners to adequately support this trend of progress.
EMEKA OSUJI