UNPOPULARITY OF TECHNICAL AND VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AMONG NIGERIAN YOUTHS: THE BANE OF NATIONAL QUEST FOR RAPID ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Nigeria has a vision of becoming one of the biggest and best 20 economies in the world by the year 2020. A country with a very large army of certificated but unskilled, unemployed and unemployable youths who have turned to all manner of crimes, thereby creating a palpable state of insecurity, is unlikely to become one of the biggest and best 20 economies of the world soon. Employers of labour complain that the products of Nigerian academic institutions are mostly unemployable due to their inadequate creative and innovative skills. It is the case that many Nigerians who have building construction projects prefer workers from neighbouring countries. There is high influx of technical workers from neighbouring countries to carry on with technical services in which Nigerians have proved incapable of satisfactory service delivery. Products of Nigerian technical and vocational institutions whose mandate is to produce semi-skilled, medium level and high level technical personnel do not seem to be producing adequately skilled human power in their sufficient numbers. Why?

According to Mustafa (2010), the Nigerian society has erroneously been made to believe that technical and vocational education (TVE) is meant for people who are incapable of pursuing academic education programmes. Academic education is erroneously considered to be superior to technical and vocational education and people prefer it. It is this negative and wrong perception of TVE that has caused slow progress in the development of TVE in Nigeria, in spite of the critical and irreplaceable role of TVE in job creation and national economic development.

Technical and vocational education is the engine of economic growth in any country. As no nation can successfully fight a war without an army, so also no nation can develop economically without a critical mass of adequately trained and motivated technical and vocational personnel who would keep the existing industries running at reasonable capacity, while creating new small scale industries thereby creating jobs for themselves and other people. In the emerging global economy, the leading factors of production and growth are knowledge, technologies, creativity and innovation. TVE produces the critical human power who would unleash these leading factors of production in the economy. Nigeria needs large number of skilled and semi-skilled workers in the trades, technologies, crafts and those with the technical know-how to move the national economy forward. Skill training enhances productivity and sustains competitiveness in the global economy. What is the state of TVE in Nigeria? What is the number of TVE institutions that function at various levels of education in Nigeria? What is the student enrolment in TVE institutions that serve the over 150 million Nigerian population? What is the relative enrolment of males and females in TVE studies in Nigeria? What are the implications of the answers to the above questions for national productivity and economic growth? This study seeks answers to the above questions.

In this study documents are used to determine the number of TVE institutions and student enrolment in such institutions in Nigeria. The funding trends for education generally and TVE in particular would be used to mirror the level of emphasis the Nigerian government places on technical and vocational education of the people for human empowerment and national economic growth, for the attainment of vision 20, 2020.