Why youths need to embrace vocational education – Ekiti technical education board chair

The Chairman, Ekiti State Board for Technical and Vocational Education, Kayode Babade, has advised youths in Ekiti State to embrace the state’s technical and vocational education for innovation, self-reliance and economic empowerment.

He spoke in Ado-Ekiti, during a media interactive programme organized by the Bureau of Community Communications.

The board chairman explained that the administration of Governor Biodun Oyebanji is undergoing various infrastructural and curriculum reforms across all the state-owned technical and vocational institutions for relevance and employability of Ekiti people.

He urged the youths to utilize the gains of technical and vocational studies set-up by the state government aimed at ensuring that they acquire marketable skills to become employers of labour.

He said, “Vocational education and skills acquisition have been a very major issue all over the world. And today in Nigeria, the federal and state governments have keyed into this particular programme. It has three advantages: One, it makes a youth self-employed;  it can enable a youth to put food on his own table and he could be an employer of labour himself, having set up his own enterprise.”

Babade pointed out that everybody could not work for government, adding that the population of Nigeria going to about 250 million.

He said, “How many people will have work? Even over 40% of the population are youths, even if not more than that. How many of them will government employ?

“Rather, let people go and create jobs. First of all, acquire a skill and then set up your own job. You’ll be independent, you’ll fend for yourself, you have your own flexible time to work and earn a living. So, this is our major focus in the Board for Technical and Vocational Education to train Ekiti youths, give them skills, marketable skills that can make them fend for themselves and for others and their family”

The board chairman remarked that the Government Technical College in Ado-Ekiti is one of the best in the West African sub-region in terms of infrastructure, equipment, adding that any of the technical colleges in Ikole, Otun and Igbara-Odo could compete with any technical college in this Nigeria.

“And so we want to use the opportunity to appreciate the governor for what he’s doing in technical education, which is part of his agenda. That is manpower development, youth employment. There is youth restiveness all over the place. There are protests today, tomorrow; an idle hand is the devil’s workshop”.