FG to train youths on entrepreneurial skills – Buhari

Within the first term of President Muhammadu Buhari in office, graduates of Nigerian universities and other higher institutions in the country are to be transformed from job seekers to job creators. This he said would be achieved through the teaching and training of youths in schools to acquire entrepreneurial skills that will make them to aspire to become employers rather than employees.

A statement issued and signed by Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, said the All Progressives Congress, APC, was committed to job creation in order to shift the focus of the nation’s youths away from crimes and insurgency.

“This administration will ensure that youths in the country are gainfully employed and youth restiveness curtailed,” the SSA added, pointing out that, the scheme will further help to achieve poverty reduction and security, which are some of the challenges this administration is currently confronted with,” the presidential aide said in the statement issued to newsmen at the weekend.
According to him, insecurity cannot be divorced from unemployment and poverty because an idle mind, they say, is the devil’s workshop.
Continuing, he said, with declining internally generated revenue and over dependence on the equally declining oil revenues, there is need to seek other ways of diversifying the economy so as to boost revenue.
He stressed that one of the ways this can be achieved is through the reorientation of our youths towards an entrepreneurial mindset, adding that, “we must therefore promote and enhance the teaching and learning of entrepreneurial skills in all schools and tertiary institutions, thereby exposing our youth to the basics and rudiments of starting and sustaining their own businesses.”

The President said that to encourage and assist Nigerian youth to move from being job seekers to job creators, his administration will sustain and improve ongoing programmes by the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria, the Bank of Industry, the Bank of Agriculture and other federal agencies to grant them start-up loans at concessionary rates.
President Buhari urged the Nigerian private sector to also do more to support government’s efforts to boost youth entrepreneurship and the development of micro, small and medium scale enterprises in the country.