Buhari tells universities to liaise with private sector to make graduates employable

President Muhammadu Buhari has called on universities to engage more meaningfully with employers of labour and the organised private sector to make their products employable.

The president who stated this in his speech at the 31st Convocation of the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA), expressed concern at the description of Nigerian graduates as unemployable.

President Buhari, who was represented by the Deputy Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), Dr Suleiman Ramon-Yussuf, said his regime considered education as the cornerstone of national development with universities as the pinnacle of education, “being the engine of knowledge generation and dissemination.”

He said, “In today’s globalised knowledge economy in which the wealth, strategic importance and ranking of any country in the comity of nations is determined largely by its knowledge economy index, my expectation is that our universities will use the instrumentality of their tripartite mandates of teaching, research and community engagement to launch Nigeria into an enviable position among nations of the world.

“In this regard, government expects Nigerian universities to produce graduates imbued with the requisite knowledge, competences, attitudes and skills to be active role players in our quest for socio-economic and technological development.

“I expect universities to pay serious attention to the less than complimentary assessment of the graduates of our universities by employers of labour. Definitely, we cannot be comfortable when products of our citadels of learning are being described as ‘unemployable,, exhibiting lack of job readiness and so on.”

On his part, the Vice- Chancellor of the university, Prof Joseph Fuwape, urged the graduating students to remain focused and diligent in to occupy the prime positions of leadership in the country.

Fuwape disclosed that a total of 153 students graduated with first-class honours, out of 3,110 students that were awarded first degrees.

He said a total of 216 students fell within the third-class category while 15 graduated with pass grade.

He added that in the school of postgraduate studies, 122 students were awarded doctorates while 720 and 517 students bagged master’s and postgraduate diplomas respectively.