SAGAMITE: EQUIPPING THE NEXT GENERATION OF NIGERIANS (II)
Sagamite is a bachelors graduate from one of the UK’s elite universities after an early life in Nigeria. He is an experienced management consultant that has worked with firms in a diverse range of industries both in public and private sector. His experience provides him with a catalogue of versatile and arcane knowledge. His current interests include logical structure of opinions/arguments, entrepreneurship and human psychology. He prides himself on his organic, objective and independent thinking, so the audience should expect a significant number of his articles to be contra-popular belief. He is one of Nigeria’s leading objective-Contrarian thinkers about life’s generally accepted conventional wisdom****
2) Encouraging successful and highly skilled Nigerians to repatriate.
It would do the country an enormous level of good to get the best of the best of its citizens abroad to return back to the country to add to its small population of highly talented locally based citizens.
The volume of highly skilled and qualified Nigeria professionals abroad is an asset a sane government should not let slip through its fingers. There are volumes of such in USA, UK, Ireland, UAE, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Holland, Germany and even Ghana to name a few places.
The number of qualified Nigerian doctors in the US and UK will probably be more than what the nation has locally. Imagine the benefits this bunch will bring to the nation if their return is encouraged and facilitated so they can come and share their knowledge with the ones at home. That will mean improved health services, a healthier workforce and probably even a sharp increase in health tourism with affluent middle class patients from other African countries heading to Nigeria for their healthcare needs.
Engineers and financiers can return to the country to assist in the development of high quality infrastructure which can help with FDI increase, thereby leading to more jobs in the employment market.
Many of these foreign-based Nigerian professionals are discouraged from coming back due to primarily 3 things: physical security, employment attractiveness and affordable comfort.
The government will have to address these things before encouraging repatriation. Not many sane men or women would leave the comfort of their suburban –living in the West to return to a country where they can have their little wards kidnapped and the ransom would wipe away their savings or where their breadwinner can be robbed and shot dead by the police themselves.
Poor labour laws with low pay and high cost of leading equivalent live they lead in their foreign base is a deterrent.
One other niggling challenge that repatriates face is the NYSC scheme. Although some repatriates might return as entrepreneurs and create employment, a large percentage would still have to come to the country and seek employment at first only to find that they are not allowed to work in Nigeria as a local except they have a NYSC clearance certificate. So imagine a Nigerian professional that left Nigeria after high school, attended an Ivy League school, has got 20 years of experience in his field and is probably makes $150K a year working in Texas. He is expected if he chooses to return to Nigeria to serve for one year, foregoing his $150K salary a year and take a miserly N240K ($1.5K) for 24months as NYSC sustenance to be qualified to work in Nigeria? I am sure some retarded Nigerians will say “be patriotic and do it” but many intelligent people would not do such.
I am also sure some Nigerians will say I am wrong and that if you are over 30 then you are qualified for exemption from NYSC. No, mate, sorry. That is not the case. You are only exempted if you finished your undergraduate degree after you are 30 years old, not if you are over 30 years old. Even if you are 62 years old, the (stupid) Nigerian law states you will still have to serve. Hence many highly qualified Nigerians who studied abroad and were lucky to quickly get top jobs abroad that led somewhere will not be able to work in Nigeria except they do some fraudulent stuff or they accept a huge opportunity cost.
3) Force internship to equip next generation
A third radical option I am thinking of is the government forcing large firms (of 200 staff and above) to have a structured programme to train the next generation.
This will be in addition to the NYSC programme. For example, for every 10 staff over 200 a firm has, it should be obliged to train at least one youth from the age of 18 to 30, who is not in permanent employment of the firm in the last 12 months, for at least a 3 month period. These training programmes must be structured and intense to enable the youth be skilled. It should be very similar to some of the schemes used in countries like Germany and which lead to their strong ability to be structured workers. In return, the government should give a decent tax rebate to such firms. Any small firm that wants the tax rebate and wants to join by offering such internship programme should also be allowed where it makes sense.
The Ministry of Youth should supervise that these training programmes meet a certain threshold of standard, probably leading to some exams to test the skills acquired by the youths.
Doing a combination of these would be good first steps in starting to equip the next generation to enable the country compete with a world that has left Africa behind.
