By PETER ANOSIKE

The Rector of Learn to Live Business School (LLBS), Dr. Chukwuma Nelson, has called for revolutionary reforms in Nigeria’s education sector to enable it to contribute meaningfully to the economic fortunes of the country by ensuring that universities collaborate with the manufacturing sector to generate enough funds to run the universities as production units, and centres to give undergraduates hands-on skills to turn them into entrepreneurs, and reduce the rate of graduate unemployment in Nigeria. Dr. Nelson spoke to journalists after the orientation exercise for the second batch of the LLBS Consultancy Accreditation Programme held at the premises of LLBS in Enugu. Excerpts…

I can see that the turnout for the second batch of the LLBS Consultancy Accreditation Programme is huge. Can you give us your educational background and how you became involved in the education sector in Nigeria?

It is a bit difficult for me to talk about my journey in education because it is not only a long story; it also spans my entire life, because I have practically been in school since I was five years old, and I have remained in school ever since, both as a student, student-worker, and now as a teacher and precisely an educationist. To make sense of it all, I combined my work as a young school leaver who worked in the bank with studying at the Institute of Management and Technology, IMT, Enugu, where I studied Accounting. I afterwards proceeded to the Enugu State University of Science and Technology, ESUT, Enugu, for Bachelor in Accounting and further programmes with ESUT Business School.

My active involvement in the education sector as a practitioner and educationist began after a chance encounter with Mr. Fela Durotoye at a seminar he organised in Port Harcourt in 2007, and that opened my eyes and changed my entire worldview about how education can be made functional, not just in making the life of the educated useful, but how education can become a tool to enhance national productivity. It was after that seminar that I took the bold step to open the Learn to Live Consult, LLC in 2012, later the Learn to Live Business School, LLBS in 2016, and we have accreditations from both the United Kingdom and Nigerian government regulatory authorities.

How would you describe the current state of education in Nigeria?

It is very easy for everybody, even those who are not operating directly in the education sector, to see that the quality of education in Nigeria keeps falling as the years go by. Without looking at the statistics churned out by both rating agencies and examination bodies, an ordinary encounter with an average Nigerian graduate will leave one wondering about the kind of learning resources available to both students and teachers, and that essentially affects the quality of the products of our institutions, from primary through secondary to tertiary schools, especially the products of public schools. Things were much better in the 1980s and early 1990s when I was in formal school, but the current erosion in standards is clearly precipitous, and the blame is at the feet of the governments that are in charge of education.

Many of the graduates are clearly unemployable because of the quality of tutoring they received in school. The basic problem, mind you, is not with the ability of the students; after all, Nigerians are very creative and excel whenever they are exposed to the right conditions, but with what they are taught, the curriculum, the relevance of what they have learned in school, and the skills requirements for the industries. That is the gap the government should be in a hurry to fill, especially with our public schools. A few of the private schools are doing quite well because of the attention and efforts of the owners. The public schools have been abandoned, and that is why the standard keeps falling. In my honest assessment, the government needs to do a thorough and revolutionary overhaul of the education sector if Nigeria wants to be counted as one of the emerging economies in the next quarter of this century.

What will you do differently if you are in charge of education administration in Nigeria, especially as it relates to tertiary education?

There are many things I will do differently, and my ultimate target would be to turn the universities into production centres to fund themselves within five years and stop them from relying on government subventions, which is the cause of the whole problem in the higher education sector. How will I achieve this?

The first step will be to revise the curriculum of universities to make it functional and relevant to the needs of industries. What do I mean? What I mean is that an electrical, mechanical, electronics, computer, or agricultural engineering graduate should be able to handle a complex task in his field of specialisation before graduation because he has been practising even while in school. A banking and finance student, business administration student, business management student, and marketing student should be able to handle simple banking operations services and offer financial advisory services to businesses before graduation. An Arts and Social Science graduate should be able to handle complex media, advertising, public relations, and administration tasks, as the case may be, before leaving the university. These possibilities will be the result of a collaboration between universities as research centres, and the industries as production centres, wherein the students will function as employees, student-workers who even pay to learn and are not only learning on the job but also acquiring skills that they can use to set up as entrepreneurs after graduation, contribute to the Gross Domestic Product, GDP, by rolling out products into the markets with the associate companies, and reduce the rate of graduate unemployment.

Let me break it down further. We have universities of agriculture, and I will ensure that they collaborate with food-producing companies, if they cannot set up their own facilities, to give us enough cassava products like garri, fufu, bread, and allied products, poultry products like eggs and chicken, fisheries, livestock, yam, etc., for self-sustenance and export. The same thing will apply to technology, engineering, and pharmaceutical colleges, which must go into the production of items like tires, drugs, motherboards, chips, and other components that are used in allied industries. At last count, there are 170 universities in Nigeria, and you can imagine the addition they will make to our GDP if 100 of them are into the production of just a single item for both local consumption and export, even within the African continent.

You talk so much about enhancing productivity; can you provide examples of how your organisation is leveraging consulting to enhance productivity in the business sector?

Learn to Live Business School, LLBS, has a consultancy arm called Learn to Live Consult, LLC, and both of them run concurrently. The LLC focuses on providing students as standalone individuals and company staff with hands-on skills that enable them to provide consultancy services to an array of industries, and we have eloquent testimonies from both individuals, companies, and government agencies that have sent their staff to be trained both at the regular Business School and the Consult.

We have a good record of having worked with our team on several occasions to revive a couple of dwindling companies, and those companies are doing very well and posting fantastic dividends for their shareholders. We have also helped governments review their work and financial processes, and they have achieved increased productivity with less downtime in their work processes and are all recording increased internally generated revenues.

We have also trained staff of governments and private companies to have consulting capacity as well as operate as in-house consultants within their organisations to the extent that they are able to work seamlessly with external consultants to enhance productivity and save costs for their organisations. Thankfully, many establishments are beginning to understand the benefits of training and retraining their staff and arming them with skills to upscale their performances and productivity. The sum total of that understanding is the gap we fill and continue to fill as a global consulting firm.

What is your vision for education in Nigeria, and what are the key areas you plan to focus on in the next five to ten years?

My vision for the education sector in Nigeria is that we will get to the point where both the leaders and the led must understand that the dynamics of education keep changing globally and at all times, and the only way we can make meaning out of our education system is to create homegrown solutions for our local problems and stop importing foreign education policies that are at variance with our situations. Part of the problem we are facing today is that we borrowed from others when it was working for them and failed to reform when it became necessary. And the time to change course is now. I want to see our leaders make revolutionary reforms that reflect that understanding.

Beyond that, my utmost desire is to see our tertiary institutions turn into learning and production centres at the same time. I have already talked at length about the need for collaboration between the education sector and manufacturing sectors so that students will become employees who are even paying to learn and produce at the same time, and for the universities to become self-sustaining and independent of the government. Universities should be run like corporations, and there are private schools that produce eggs, vegetables, potable water, and other consumables for their school communities, and that shows that the model can work at the national level with the right kind of policies and credible leadership across the board. Our educational sector has the capacity to contribute a large chunk of our GDP, like many countries in the world that rely on the earnings from their education sector for their national sustenance.

In a nutshell, I want to see our education sector turn into an economic centre because it has the potential to generate enough funds to rescue us from the current economic predicament we are facing.

And as an organisation, LLBS has a vision to churn out 5000 well-baked, highly qualified, international-compliance consultants in the next five years, and these consultants will be the industrial foot soldiers to take Nigeria to the next level and scale national productivity to the point that the country will take its rightful place in the global business and economic community. We have the resources to achieve that as a people; what we need are the right policies, and determination, which is not lacking in Nigerians.

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