Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, yesterday, outlined some measures to develop the nation’s economy.
The renowned bureaucrat and professor of public administration spoke at the maiden international conference of the Faculty of Management Sciences, Federal University, Lokoja, Kogi State, on the “Future of the Nigerian Economy.”
In Olaopa’s lecture entitled, “Achieving a Robust and Inclusive Economy: Prospect and Challenges,” he examined the current trajectory of the Nigerian economy, the situation of the key sectors, the leadership forthrightness and creativity being brought to bear by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu while offering a range of recommendations on how governance and policy reforms would consolidate a robust and inclusive economic growth
He noted that “government must necessarily tilt policy designs inwards towards a self-sustaining development paradigm, even as the nation cannot but draw strength from opportunities offered by the global economies to stand strong. We, therefore, must reverse the consumption-production discrepancy, which implies paying rigorous attention to enabling local content that rides on a made-in-Nigeria consumption values reorientation and cultural adjustment.”
According to Olaopa, Nigeria cannot afford to benchmark past policy failures by sustaining a pattern of growth with a “largely untransformed economic structure; one that is uneven and socially non-inclusive, and therefore generating limited sources of new employment. Such low employment intensity is historically linked to an economic structure that is heavily dependent on oil and gas, which by its character, is heavily capital and non-labour intensive in terms of its production process.”
Olaopa decried what he identified as a “skills mismatch in youth unemployability” caused by government education policy, which erroneously tends to emphasise formal, technical and vocational education training to the detriment of traditional apprenticeship and non-formal training.
He, therefore, recommended that policy action should be directed at re-organising the traditional apprenticeship and non-formal national vocational training systems as a way of increasing their capacities and capabilities to generate employment in the informal sector of the economy.
