Buhari charges Nigerian varsities to produce ‘quality graduates’ for labour market

President Muhammadu Buhari said on Saturday that many Nigerian graduates were regarded as unemployable by employers of labour and urged the universities to devised new educational strategies for the country.

Buhari, who spoke at the 31st Convocation of the Federal University of Technology, Akure, (FUTA), Ondo State, said the development has become a huge source of concern to his administration.

He, therefore, called on universities in the country to be more proactive in ensuring that their graduates were employable.

The President said the present administration considered education as the cornerstone of national development with universities as the pinnacle of education, “being the engine of knowledge generation and dissemination.”

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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, competencies, 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.”

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