Godsend, not ‘Godsent’
SATURDAY Expression
With Ebere Wabara; ewabara@yahoo.com, 08055001948
DAILY SUN Centre-spread of March 27 welcomes us today with the first headline blunder in this edition: “Hit millions making ice block (cube) in recession”
From THISDAY of March 25 come the next two solecisms: “My late husband was a Godsent (Godsend).” A rewrite; My late husband was Godsend
“Osinbajo: FG to build modular refineries in oil producing (oil-producing) areas”
Let us welcome GALAXY TV to this medium. Its News at 7 of March 27 fumbled on two occasions: “After a heavy downpour in Abule Otun, Ogun State, residents of the area….” ‘Downpour’ is a heavy rainfall. So, ‘heavy downpour’ is sheer pleonasm.
“Police parades 48 suspects in Akure” (News reel from the above medium) Reaching for the stars: Police parade
“FIRS arrests 9 suspects over (for) fake jobs, staff promotions”
“With them is (are) Mr. and Mrs….”
“Commissioning (Inauguration) of borehole brings succour to Enugu community”
“Abuja Motor Fair opens Oct. 22, organizers assure on security” Who did they assure?
“2019: It’s fight to finish in Ado” Politics Today: fight to the death/finish
“Bravo! Our sports loving (sports-loving) governor is 54!”
“The state chairman, executives and all the members of APC, Imo State (another comma) rejoices (congratulations on this gaffe)
“Supreme Court swears-in (swears in) 17 SANs”
“Police kill 4 armed bandits in Delta” There cannot be ‘banditry’ without arms!
“In as much (Inasmuch) as it is within….”
“Another feather to (in) your cap”
“Government of Akwa Ibom State Bureau For Inter-Governmental & National Assembly Relations, Abuja: Galands (Garlands) to Akwa Ibom @ 30” (Full-page advertorial)
Still from the Bureau: “We have noted with great pride and satisfaction your unparalled (unparalleled) efforts in….”
“When you demand for it….” Insight: delete ‘for’.
“…at no point has (had) either the Nigerian or South African authorities (authority) implicated Pastor Oritsejafor in either of their investigations.” (Full-page advertorial by CAN)
“…encouraging others to do same (the same) in order to make Al-Jannah.”
“I hope my successors will see potentials (potential/potentialities) I have put on ground”
Still on THE NATION ON SUNDAY under review: “We on this occasion wants… (I discontinue, please!)
“When the opportunity to serve the people of Lagos Central beckons (beckoned) at the upper chamber of our National Assembly, you accepted with a mind set to make a difference.”
SATURDAY INDEPENDENT returns after a long absence: its March 26 edition goofed: “PDP at crossroads (at a/the crossroads) on who to nominate as flagbearer (sic) (standard bearer)”
“I don’t bite more than I can chew” Box office: I don’t bite off more than I can chew”
“Government has made overture (an overture or overtures) to these people, to dialogue with them in other (order) to know how to solve their problems.”
“Villagers beseige hospital for free treatment” Spell-check: besiege.
“In this way, life expectancy bulges as the chances of contacting AIDS considerably diminish.” Nobody contacts a disease—‘contract’ is the word.
“The progressive social option implicit in President Buhari’s analysis is affirmative action aimed at eliminating or drastically reducing poverty.” Get it right: an affirmative action.’ Articles are not optional in count-word environments.
“It attracted women of notes such as….” Whether two or 20 women, it is still ‘note’; not notes. The same thing applies to ‘men of substance’; not ‘substances’.
“Led by a warrant officer, the mutineers stationed at strategic positions in and around the premises….” This way: on and around the premises’; never in the premises.
“The roots of the dialogue reach back to the 19th and early 20th centuries when leaders of the African Diaspora began to advocate for….” ‘Advocate’ cannot accommodate ‘for’ in verbal contexts.
“To prove that he had not quite forgotten all the stuff that he crammed from such columns in those days, he went on to recite off-head some scientific definitions.…” We recite off-hand. To do otherwise will be fatal!
“Pupils and their parents will continue to cut corners, in spite of such measures, for as long as the dearth of facilities in our educational institutions remain a permanent feature of our schools.” Simple concord: the dearth…remains a permanent feature of our schools.
“Watching these kids sing and play together evoke the thought that most adults, if not all, should hold their heads in shame.” Watching these kids…evokes.
“Prophet Nathan’s famous warning came after the deed has been done.” (Source: as above) Perfect past: after the deed had been done.
“As the fall-outs of our economic direction accumulate….” ‘Fallout’ is non-count and one word.
“The military indicated that the soldiers were charged for mutiny…” Standard expression: charged with.
“However, the cost of damages to the installations could not be ascertained.” ‘Damage’ is non-count except in legal reparation.
‘As president, Buhari will have to combat the unemployment problem by coming down….” I doubt if there’s any context where ‘unemployment’ will not be a problem.
Overheard, again: How is your children? Court…I adjourn till next Saturday!
FEEDBACK
My brother, thanks for your forage into broadcast news. I am just listening to Radio Nigeria at 4 p.m. (March 26). You won’t believe this: “Cattle rustlers arrested in Katsina State for stealing several cattles (cattle)”! Even if the editor did not know, what about the newsreader? Hope your family is okay? (Sunny Agbontaen/08062998165)
JUST done with your sweet piece, Spirit of activism. I celebrate your tribe. And at the same time, I feel sorry for our universities. (Charles Iyoha/09099879033).
INTERVIEW STORY
Emmanuel Okeleji
We Should Review the Way We Educate Our Youth
As a qualified medical doctor, Dr. Emmanuel Okeleji was trained in the art and science of saving lives. Today, his training and passion are finding creative and innovative expressions in the realm of entrepreneurship. His human capital development technology company, Insidify, is revolutionising the world of work through an impressive catalogue of ground-breaking solutions meticulously designed to effectively tackle Nigeria’s jobs conundrum, harnessing the potent force of technology. In this interview with Olaoluwakitan Babatunde, he x-rays Nigeria’s jobs market
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country’s most important resource is its people. Mature and emerging economies around the globe are having robust conversations around the development of their human capital for global competitiveness in industry and innovation. What big ideas should Nigeria’s Ministry of Labour and Productivity and related agencies be pursuing in this regard?
Yes, People are the greatest resource a nation can have. One will not be wrong then to think that if you have an abundance of this great resource, you are a rich nation. Unfortunately, this is not the case with much of Africa, for the simple fact that like other resources the continent has, her people are not being refined into more useful “finished products”. Africa is currently experiencing a youth bulge with more than 50 percent of its 1.2 billion people below 30, making Africa the continent with the youngest population in the world. Our youth bulge should indeed be an advantage, but it is a burden and a drag on our limited infrastructure. What is even more worrisome is what the future holds for Nigeria and Africa if we continue to treat the issue of employment and productivity with levity as we do today. According to UN projections, in 2050 there will be about 400 million people in Nigeria, and close to 300 million of this will be under 30.
At today’s unemployment rate, there will be about 220 million unemployed and underemployed Nigerian youths by 2050. By this time as well, Africa’s population will be about 2.4 billion, 1.5 billion of which will be under 30. At today’s unemployment rates, over 1 billion African youths will be unemployed and underemployed by 2050. That is a huge problem with such numbers, because it will be impossible to live on this continent – the crime rate, the wars that the unemployed youth will have to resort to, will make the continent unlivable! So, I am not quite sure that this is about big ideas. I think it is rather about focusing on making the small things work. Small things like cause and effect. Education must match demand. There has to be a deliberate effort to educate our youth with the right knowledge to solve our problems – there! That is not a big idea. It looks almost too rudimentary, but alas, there lies the biggest cause of unemployment in Nigeria. We are presently educating our population into unemployment and underemployment. When young innocent 16 to 17-year-olds come to our universities and we give them training that is outdated and useless to the global and local demand, we are actively destroying their capacity to be competitive both locally and globally. How do we tackle this situation? My recommendation would be a radical re-thinking of the way we educate our young people. The Ministries of Education as well as Labour and Productivity should work in concert with employers to evaluate the real needs of the present day labour market, the problem profile of the nation, the global demand for skill and the forecast of demand for labour over the next 20 years. The results of these analyses should then drive the way education is delivered at all levels. By all levels, I am referring to the structured educational systems of primary, secondary and tertiary as well as vocational education that focus on helping the informal sector. To fix unemployment for the mass of our people, we need to build the reputation of having some of the best artisans, bricklayers, cobblers, nannies, cooks and tailors in the world!
According to Mercer, two of the top six trends that influenced the talent management priorities of leading global organisations in 2016 were; a rising demand – with competition – for talent from emerging economies and World Sourcing – hiring of talent from locations around the world. How prepared and qualified is the average Nigerian graduate or worker to fit into this highly competitive global equation where demand for labour is glocal?
I agree with you that the demand for labour is “glocal”. Let me give you two examples of how Nigeria is losing out right now. Firstly, I was trained as a Medical Doctor. There is a current massive brain drain of doctors from Nigeria to the UK, US, Saudi Arabia and even the UAE. Recently, a friend of mine was going to write PLAB 1, the exams Doctors write to qualify to practice in the UK; all the slots to write this exam in Nigeria and Ghana had been filled up for 4 months ahead – by Nigerians! He had to travel to Dubai to write it. By anecdotal estimates, approximately 4 out of every 10 foreign doctors writing the PLAB exams now are Nigerians. There are over 5,000 Nigerian Doctors in the US. The second is software programmers. A good friend, OO Nwoye, just wrote an interesting piece on how global demand for software programmers and the comparatively higher pay that international demand is able to offer, especially as exaggerated by the on-going naira devaluation, is making it harder for us to keep the few good programmers in Nigeria here. From these two examples, you will find that there is indeed a massive global demand for people who can deliver the goods; but I struggle to see many more examples beyond these two, where Nigerians are actively filling the global demand for niche skills – maybe one more – Nigerian nurses. Asides these three areas – doctors, nurses and programmers – the Nigerian graduates in other disciplines are not particularly prepared for what the world needs. This is not to say there are not outliers outside of these three disciplines who are doing it all by themselves internationally straight from Nigerian Universities but the numbers are not impressive. What typically happens is that, Nigerians go to Europe and America for postgraduate studies and then get equipped there to be competitive. The undergraduate and even graduate programs here are not particularly helpful in today’s global market.
A global trend that shaped HR priorities in the past year was talent scarcity. Workers with analytical skills and specialised technical skills in growing areas like STEM and IT are in short supply globally. What tech-led and tech-focused human capital development approaches should the Nigerian government as well as schools be embracing now?
If we map global trends and align our education to fit, Nigerians are very brilliant people and we will be globally competitive across many areas in no time. Secondly, specifically with technology – I read recently that the Nigeria Universities Commission (NUC) was frowning at online degrees. Now, that would be in bad taste. We cannot cover the gap between us and the rest of the world by sticking to analogue pedagogy. The opposite should be happening; we should be embracing online learning and supporting innovation along that line to quickly fill up the skill gaps we have. We should be supporting start-ups who are working on online training for professionals, artisans, online MBAs etc. For example, Insidify is building local e-learning platforms with local content that will rival the Courseras and Lynda.coms of this world in terms of Africa-centric content. It is projects like ours that government and other stakeholders should be supporting.
One interesting idea I chanced on in a recent conversation with a Director of a leading US based e-learning platform is blended learning. Nigerian educational institutions can quickly bridge the education gap by aligning their curriculum with that of Universities in the developed world through a deliberate blend of local content and e-learning courses from foreign Ivy League universities. For instance, imagine that the Civil Engineering or Electrical and Electronics Department of Lagos State University can get on the MIT or Harvard Open Course Platform and weave their Electronics curriculum in such a way that as part of the requirements to complete a semester, students have to take and pass some course units from MIT, Harvard and Columbia – all these can be done for free, online or at the most with a signed MOU from these Ivy leagues – a concession I am very sure many will be falling over themselves to give. One final note on this question is that when you mentioned “tech-led approach”, I have noticed a trend of people assuming that anything tech has to be about programmers and start-ups. Tech should not be viewed from those lenses alone because it runs deep. It is to me a universal platform; hence the task of thinking about tech solutions to our skill gap challenges should not be seen as some esoteric concoctions that only programmers can understand. I think all stakeholders should be bold enough to understand and think tech.
With a relentless rise in the number of whole industries, jobs and careers that face the prospect of disruptive innovation, what really is the future of work and how can Nigerian organisations and the Nigerian worker prepare to be relevant and competitive in what has been termed the fourth industrial revolution?
Good question. The future of work in Africa is bleak if we continue along the path we are currently on. Two trends worry me – automation and clean energy. The automation age is a lot more advanced than the mechanization age. Indeed, everywhere, we are seeing mechanization giving way to automation. The high goal of automation is actually for machines to acquire the intelligence of man and take over the tasks of logic, decision making and maybe even rationality. It is not a question of if; it is a question of when.
In a simple illustration, look at it this way, we used cutlasses and hoes to farm but now one tractor can do the work that 10 men would do in a week in just 10 hours; that is mechanization. But the tractor is operated by one man, who gets tired and takes breaks to eat and goes to sleep at night. Imagine that the tractor is operated by a robot that does not get tired, take breaks to eat or sleep at night. Add another layer to it by imagining that the farmed crops are genetically modified to produce 100 times the amount that the unmodified equivalent will produce. What do you think this will do to the Nigerian farmer who still uses his hoe and cutlass? The second is clean energy. I read recently about the SABRE – Synthetic Air Breathing Rocket Engine – that within a decade will fly planes at ultrasonic speeds using air as fuel. This and thousands of other projects going on around the world will completely change the demand for fossil fuels over the next two decades. What we are seeing now with the global crash in oil prices which is the primary reason why Nigeria is in this economic crisis is only the first salvo in what will become a new world order. When automation and clean energy go mainstream globally, what will happen is that the nation will make little or nothing in income – because 70% of our incomes come from fossil fuels. Automation will reduce demand for our human resource and unfortunately for us we will not be educated enough to play in the automation world. How to prepare? Modernize! Modernize your skills, modernize our education, be part of the next trend.
In terms of Nigeria’s human capital development imperatives, what collaboration ideas and initiatives should the government, private sector and higher institutions of learning be exploring in concert?
I will answer this with an example. Alhaji Aliko Dangote, a Nigerian I respect greatly is building a refinery that should open in 2019 hopefully. This will be the largest single refinery in Africa, with a capacity of 650,000bpd which is around 50 percent more than all the government refineries in Nigeria at full capacity. He is in the private sector. He will need thousands of engineers, scientists and support staff. These are jobs. But Nigerian universities are not training young Nigerian graduates with the specific skills Dangote will need in this refinery, because Professors at Obafemi Awolowo University and UNILAG have never built or run a refinery in real life and cannot teach what they do not know. So, Dangote’s refinery will open in 2019 and he will not find enough locally trained Nigerians to work in it. He will be forced to hire Indians, Chinese and Europeans – thus exporting jobs which we do not have, and driving up his own cost, to God forbid, unsustainable levels. Imagine that Dangote collaborated with six Nigerian Universities three years ago – by collaboration I mean the company investing in curriculum design, exchange/knowledge sharing programs and internships so that in 5 years, these universities would have trained different cadres of professionals who can work in the refineries from day one and can add immense value from the get-go. Now imagine that the government midwifed this relationship and got the input of not only Dangote, but Honeywell and Erisco Foods and Beloxxi and other Nigerian industries and helped the universities to develop the skills these industries need – now how is that for helping to fix unemployment and underemployment?
Fascinating! Now, as a human resource technology company, Insidify has developed an interesting suite of tech products and services in the last couple of years that empower all parties along the employment value chain for goal optimisation. Please share some of these with us.
Our suite of solutions is based on a keen understanding of what the African unemployment and underemployment challenge is. We have looked at the problem for quite some time and developed a holistic one-stop-shop strategy and a bouquet of world-class products around it. Insidify Limited is a Human Capital Development Technology Company that is focused on tackling the unemployment problem in Africa with Technology. In the last three years, the company has deployed world-class technology to help over 150,000 job seekers find jobs and opportunities in Nigeria and 100s of employers find excellent talent and build greater teams. The first of our products www.insidify.com is a Job Search Engine that aggregates jobs from hundreds of sources into one portal — a kind of Google for jobs. The idea is, there are not enough jobs in the first place, so you have to give job seekers an efficient platform where they can at least see all the jobs available on the internet and increase their chances? That is why we built an aggregator. The second iswww.seamlesshiring.com, a robust online platform that helps employers to manage the entire process of recruitment seamlessly; from automatically advertising job openings on up to 10 jobsites and newspapers, to sorting and filtering applicants, generating several reports, running online recruitment tests, automated background and health checks, and much more. Because an average of 800 people apply for every job role that is posted online, Nigerian employers need a robust technology solution that can help them make sense of the deluge. As a matter of business survival, founders and business owners also need their HR professionals to be able to find the best hires in their pool of job applicants. Thirdly, Insidify’s Learning Management System (LMS) – Staff Class, is a robust platform for employers to manage staff learning and development. On Staff Class, employers can upload their own content and serve it to staff on a modern e-learning platform. Management wants to make sure that modern learning methods are successfully adopted across the relevant depth and width of the organization. Employee scores and performance, time logs, in-class contributions and much more are then tracked at several levels – individual, departmental, location etc. Other products include Insidify Learning, our e-learning platform for professionals and jobseekers and Insidify Discovery a very robust productivity blog focused on jobseekers, professionals and employers. The approach is deliberately holistic, because the goal is not to just build something for the fun of it, but to actually solve problems and with the nature of unemployment in Nigeria, there is no silver bullet.
How encouraging and competitive has the Nigerian operating environment been for Insidify?
Encouraging because we see huge potential; the enormity of the possibilities keeps me and my team awake all night and all day. There is just so much we can do to truly be useful and helpful. The fact also that Nigeria presents us with a Petri dish of sorts, where we can perfect products and strategies and then scale to the rest of Africa and emerging markets around the world is encouraging. Frustrating because there is no power, not enough capital investments, not enough good skills; not just programmers alone, we need analysts, product specialists, marketers, psychologists, writers, and we cannot find them in enough quantity. But I am an incurable optimist, so despite all the mess Nigeria throws at us, we just keep soldiering on with the goal in focus.
What is your evaluation of Nigeria’s budding tech industry and what would you like to see happen in that space in the near future?
I see a very bright future for Nigerian tech. If in doubt, when you see people like Mark Zuckerberg, YCombinator, 500Start-ups and others staking bets on Nigeria’s tech industry, you will find confirmation. Mark put his time, money and endorsement on that during his visit last year and several others are following in same step. You see, innovation needs problems just as much as problems need innovation. I think that the potpourri of problems Nigeria offers gives us a unique platform to see certain problems in their pure form and from a different perspective from the rest of the world. This means that we will be able to proffer solutions that are better than what others who do not have the kind of intimate romance we have with these problems can proffer. What I will like to see happen is: more staying power. Nigerian tech entrepreneurs need to fight the good fight longer. It is hard and all that, but only those who finish the race get rewarded. Local high net-worth individuals need to invest in tech more. Instead of keeping their dollars in a bunker – invest in start-ups. Amenities – well that is everybody’s problem: if that improves, it will be very helpful.
