The Executive Secretary of the National Board for Technical Education, Prof. Idris Bugaje, made the call at the review of 10 National Technical Certificates and Advance National Technical Certificates Curricular Workshop, a World Bank assisted project, held in Kaduna.
According to Bugaje, the country would go nowhere in terms of technological breakthrough if technical colleges were not re-engineered and reinvented as is in the case in advanced nations.
He noted that to achieve this, the government must be committed to ensuring “proper funding of technical education, building of more infrastructure, training technical teachers as well as improving the curriculum.”
This way, he added, Nigeria would witness unprecedented changes in term of technical know how, adding that “technical colleges and technical teachers training are required so that we can reinvent and re-engineer the technical colleges,” for the nation’s greatness.
He said, “Our polytechnics in Nigeria are supposed to admit students from technical colleges, but because the admission to technical colleges is so low, less than 1 per cent of 123 technical schools out of over 15,000 secondary schools.
“We will not go anywhere if we do not re-engineer and reinvent the technical college. One way of doing that is the curriculum which we are already doing; but most importantly we need to put the correct infrastructure, we need to improve the environment.
“We need to kill this broken window syndrome. Once you go to a technical college, the gate is broken, the windows are broken, the machines are dilapidated. That has to change. We need proper infrastructure, proper machinery and trained teachers.
“Those who studied sociology and Nigerian languages that teaching in technical colleges should be booted out from those schools.
“Recruit the right people to lead them.
“I know of a technical school where somebody who studied Hausa is the principal. What does he know about skills?”
The NBTE executive further said that to boost the technical manpower needed to power industrialisation, the country should move technical college admission from the one per cent level at the moment “to at least five per cent.”
“In another 10 years we should move to at least 25 per cent and in another 15 years we should move admissions to technical schools from 25 to 50 per cent.
“That should be the win win situation for skills in Nigeria, so that technical colleges will be at par with the conventional secondary schools so that polytechnics would be directed only to admit students from the technical colleges.
“It is because of the absence of students from technical colleges that polytechnics are admitting students from conventional secondary schools.
“By the time we have that 50 – 50 ratio, Nigeria will have no problem with skills production both for local needs and for export. This should be the way to go,” Bugaje added.
