The biggest latent opportunity in the African informal economy is building a grassroot of makers and builders through a world-class vocational program. Around 1976, the Ovim Community League (OCL) conceived a secondary school, and named it Secondary Technical School Ovim, my alma mater. The plan was to provide pathways to train and develop young people who could pursue both vocational and professional careers.
As early as the 1980s, the school was offering courses on Woodwork Technology, Automotive Technology and the typical. It was a great school as the village hired supporting external teachers and experts, outside the government ones, to operate equipment and machinery in the school workshops. Then WAEC happened and distorted the whole plan, just like other technical colleges across Nigeria.
Yes, a student who studied Auto tech could not use it to enter a university to study Mechanical Engineering via JAMB. Parents picked the signal that all those courses were largely useless because JAMB made them irrelevant for anyone to use them meaningfully for future aspirations. During my time in the school, there were three tracks – Arts, Science and Technology. Today, the Technology part has severely degraded because of the JAMB bottleneck. (The village recently commissioned a new technology building).
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Where am I going? Through structural designs, technology and a broad vocational program across Nigeria has been destroyed because those on that path cannot see a pathway to grow if they hope to dream in the future. You can be a mechanic today, but you may also want to study engineering in a university later. To do that, you have to go back to Physics and Chemistry with no exceptions.
Interestingly, the needs for those vocational guys are high. From plumbers to tilers to bricklayers, Nigeria and the world need them. Denmark now wants to import them because they help to fix nations from the bottom up: “Denmark is looking for skilled workers in various sectors and has announced a new visa scheme to attract them. The Danish government has launched the Positive List 2024, which includes 34 occupations that are in high demand and face a shortage of qualified professionals.”
Nigeria has that shortage today but no one is fixing the paralysis. We have relied on Togolese for our tiling, plumbing, etc, but now many of them are returning home since the Naira collapsed.
*That reminds me, if you are an industrial welder, Egoras has a job for you. The lack of industrial welders is affecting the company’s growth in Nigeria right now. Of course, it can look for Togolese except that many of them are returning home since Naira collapsed.
Denmark announces visas for welders, bricklayers, mechanics, teachers, others
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I have been hammering on this issue for long, the economy is still largely artisan, but we don’t have skilled and qualified artisan and technicians at scale. As a product of technical school, this thing they called/call ‘grammar school’ messed things up. Rather than training kids with practical skills, we churn out those who compete in speaking phonetics. Now we neither have people who can speak and write very well nor those with practical skills. So we lost both ways.
Aside from wannabe politicians, what do we even have in abundance, doctors or lawyers? If the economy is up and running, we don’t even have enough lawyers and courts for a big economy.
Our problems are many, but the people who are tasked with solving them are also problems needing to be solved. Maybe we can train artisans for export, since we need dollars from anywhere in the universe.