HIGHER EDUCATION AND MANPOWER DEVELOPMENT: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BENIN

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

Education has been defined in diverse ways to suit the situation o r process under review. Education is the complete development of human such that he/she becomes functionally useful to himself/herself, society and humanity at large. It is the aggregate of the process through which a person develops abilities, attitudes and forms of behavior that are of positive value in the society in which he/she lives. Education in its general sense is fundamental and basic to human and overall societal development. It is in turn, makes its recipient self-reliant and self-sustaining. The extent of development of societies has been associated to the extent of the literacy of its citizenry. The importance of education to national development project cannot be over-emphasized. Since the attainment of national independence in October, 1960, the successive Nigerian governments have acknowledged this fact and have instituted various measures of policy commitment and action; more also, in electioneering campaigns and national budgets. Politicians and policy makers alike have always recognized and politicized the centrality of good education, especially higher education in national development. Hence, they have frequently stress on the establishment of more universities, polytechnics, colleges of education and the expansion of existing higher education institutions by advocating for the creation of multi-campus arrangements, provision of adequate infrastructural materials, qualified teachers and so forth (Araromi and Adeyoju, 1996:83). In fact, it is sufficiently clear that a nation which fails to provide good education for her citizens would sooner or later face the logical antithesis of sustainable development: Mass illiteracy, superstition, poverty, diseases, de-industrialization and low productivity. This mainly explains why governments are highly interested in the educational system, particularly in developing countries.

To this end, the Federal Government declared in the preamble to the National Policy on Education revised in 2004 (the first clear-cut education policy in Nigeria) that:“Education in Nigeria is no more a private enterprise, but a huge government venture that has witnessed a progressive evolution of government’s complete and dynamic intervention and active participation. The Federal government of Nigeria has adopted education as an instrument par excellence for eecting national development. It is only natural that government should clarify the philosophy and objectives that underlie its current massive investment in education and spell out in clear or unequivocal terms the policies that guide government’s educational eort”. Manpower development is the continuous systematic analysis of the skilled manpower that are required in the economy. This involves the quantification of the required manpower in terms of quality, type and amount of education. Higher education is a veritable tool for manpower development, but manpower development can be enhanced if adequate attention is given to the higher educational system in Nigeria and the University of Benin in particular. Higher education is still grossly inadequately funded, with several negative consequences for academic freedom and university autonomy. Infrastructural facilities, equipments for teaching, research and learning are either lacking or very inadequate. From the above preamble, it is clear that government recognizes that for it to be quite meaningful, education has to be pertinently related to the national development agenda.

Statement of the Problem

This study derives from the concern on how adequate or otherwise, contemporary higher education in Nigeria provides for manpower needs (technical and managerial) of manufacturing industries. In spite of the increasing proliferation of universities and polytechnics in Nigeria during the past decade, it is evident that the profile of links between higher education and industries especially in the areas of development and utilization of skilled labour has not been meaningfully investigated.

In fact, the original objective of universities serving as centres for generating innovative knowledge and personal requisite for creating new productive systems and on the other hand producing graduate manpower to help in maintaining these systems, especially in industries tends to be rapidly compromised (Longe, 1991) A probably more disturbing scenario is that as technological changes occur in the Nigerian manufacturing sector through import substitution industrialization, the latter does not seem to stimulate a commensurate review in the curricular of the students who are supposedly trained to meet the manpower needs of our industries. All these have led us to the following thematic puzzle namely “how far and how well does higher education in Nigeria satisfy the manpower needs of the industrial sector with particular reference to manufacturing”?