President NIPEM Professional Education Management International, Maurice Odiete has called for collective collaboration between government, developmental and educational institutions to achieve national economic development in the country.
Speaking at the 5th anniversary of NIPEM Professional Management International which held in Lagos, Maurice who is a Professor urged educational institutions to imbibe academic and entrepreneurial knowledge on students, adding that such effort would help reduce the alarming rate of unemployment in the country.
“We so much believe in education which also enhances employment, in the country today there are so many universities, in every four or six months we are having graduates, at the end of the period you still see the graduates roaming the streets,” he added.
On the event which held under the theme, ‘Professionalism and academic excellence: antecedence to national economic development,’ the professor explained that the celebration focuses on national economic development through empowering and re-empowering citizens to harness not only their academic knowledge, but entrepreneurial ingenuities to solving national problems related to employment, economic growth and boosting standard of living while reducing cost of living.
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Maintaining that his institution focuses on imbibing academics and entrepreneurial knowledge on students so as to enable theme create jobs for themselves, he said: “There are no jobs or employment for graduates, what we have succeeded in doing is not just to give access to education, but also be able to inculcate into these students the need for them to believe in themselves, to harness their potentials, maximise their potentials and utilise it not just getting self-employed, but also to employ other people.”
On the commitment of NIPEM towards solving problem of unemployment, Odiete said that it is not just creating jobs or employment opportunities; it also trains multiple layers of employers through deployment of entrepreneurial ingenuities of students and graduates.
Guest speaker at the event, Evans Ufeli, affirmed that peace can only be achieved in any country by investing in the intellectual quotients of the people and the country’s brains.
Ufeli also said that Nigeria stands to reap from its abundance of intellectual and human resource through increased investment in education of the citizens, adding “conducts are shaped by learning and absence of learning leads to decadence.
“We do not have enough investment in education, today we have less than 3 per cent of national budget directed to education and this has its impact in national economic development.
“Aggregate ignorance in a county depletes whatever the country has to do. Today we have over 64 per cent of the population as illiterates or semi-illiterates, that is why whatever the minority of 36 percent literates does, would be overturned by the majority 64 illiterate’s population. It is not ideal for our population to be growing in geometric progression why our economy is growing in arithmetic progression,” he said.
