Poised to boost productivity and address the knowledge gap in Nigerian universities, a research and policy institute, the African Heritage Institution, has embarked on retraining of Economics, Banking and Finance lecturers of universities across the southeast zone.

Acting Executive Director of the African Heritage Institution, Mr Chinwike Uba, said this in Enugu after a meeting with heads of departments of Economics, Banking and Finance drawn from the universities in the zone.

Uba, who noted the need to bring the lecturers at par with best practices in academics in contemporary times, said the decision to retrain the lecturers was borne out of the general outrage that university graduates were no longer employable as well as the rejection of graduates and certificates of Nigerians by some overseas universities.

According to him, the research institution decided to embark on the free training as part of efforts to curb the trend and give back to the society. He also stressed that it would engage the services of the egg heads in the institution as well as foreign partners who are grounded in the disciplines to prosecute the exercise.

He said: “As an institution, we discovered that there is a clamour or outrage that most of our graduands are not employable and our inquest into the reasons for this revealed that part of the problem is the inadequate or lack of adequate skills by the trainers of these students and the institution decided to fill the gap by inviting these lecturers to hear from them.

“During the discussions we identified that the curriculum used by the universities are not moving in line with the advancement in the society.” He added.

On the benefits of the free training programme, which would commence before the end of first quarter, Uba said: “Nigerian economy can only grow when you have a productive manpower and in life, outside the physical resources, what rules is the manpower. So we want to build the human capital that we have in this country and in other words build the economy of Nigeria and Africa at large.”