The Cross River State Government has solicited support from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) to build an edifice to house all practical skills for its state-owned university of Education and Entrepreneurship.
The state governor, Bassey Otu, who appealed during a visit to TETFund on Wednesday in Abuja, stressed the importance of human capital development in confronting challenges of underdevelopment, poverty, and unemployment.
Otu, who also commended the Fund under the leadership of Arch. Sonny Echono on the visible infrastructural development in the country, noted that the state requires support for its newly converted College of Education to the University of Education and Entrepreneurship where craftsmen, bricklayers, welders, and others will be trained.
“Let me on the same note, start by commending you highly because what you’re doing in terms of infrastructure in our universities, in our tertiary institutions, is very visible, particularly under the leadership of the present executive secretary. We’ve seen and noticed a lot of changes.
“The College of Education we are upgrading it to the University of Education and Entrepreneurship. This is going to be the first one in the country. That’s why we here soliciting very genuine and strong support.
“I say so because we continue to produce thousands of graduates who are not employable, they can’t be engaged anywhere. And we also agree that most of the time, things that you learn or study in school are not things you practice outside.
“We’ve gotten to that point which we have to change it. We want every student that goes out of this university to be able to have at least not less than two skills, and he should be able to define two theses, one in education and the other one or two in the skills which he has acquired.”
In his response, Echono assured the governor of support stressing that such support is one of TETFund’s obligations to the states.
“On behalf of our management and especially the Board of Trustees, we will offer support to this initiative. We are aware of the guidelines and the procedures and all of that for enlistment, but we are also flexible, because the board of trustees has taken the position that we must meet our obligations to states, what we refer to as equality of states, and the resources that we have must go equally to all the states of the Federation through their institutions.
“The issue of the conversion of the College of Education to a specialized University of Education and ICT, I think it is profound and again, it’s consistent with the type of thinking that we have. I felt so happy hearing you because I see there’s a whole lot of similarity between your vision and that of the president.”
He said the president gave a task to the Fund to ensure that every Nigerian child graduating from the nation’s tertiary institutions must have proficiency in ICT and technology skills in addition to whatever course they will study in the university.
“And we have been taking steps towards this, especially by promoting various digital resources that we want to make available to students in our beneficial institutions.
“We must make the right investments. We must review entirely our curriculum and the delivery systems to ensure that the people we are producing, the graduates we are producing, not only have the skills but are global citizens that can work anywhere, that can work from anywhere, for anybody,” he added.
Jack Acheme, Abuja, Voice of Nigeria
