Democracy
By Sylvester Thompson
Celebrating Nigeria’s democracy, Dr Ifeanyi Nwafor, Nigerian business man, says government should improve the educational sector and facilitate training programs in order to build a highly educated workforce.
Nwafor spoke in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria(NAN) on Tuesday in Abuja.
He said building a highly skilled and educated workforce was very important in a global community and would enable Nigeria compete favourably.
He noted that companies in advanced countries such as the United States, Canada and Britain among others , outsource some of the Information Technology (IT) jobs in countries like Malaysia and India.
“The reason why they’re going there is because these countries have a highly educated workforce,which can be easily trained to do some of the tasks that would had been done in their country.
“So, we want the government to look into how to improve our educational systems and training programs to enable us compete with all these countries.
” There are a lot of investments in this, many companies channel money into these countries to hire their workers, to set up infrastructure to do all these in these places,” he said.
Nwafor, who is Managing Director, Metrodigital Ltd., explained that when Nigeria boasts of a highly trained workforce, companies like Microsoft could come in to invest and carry out their software development.
According to him, companies like Apple and others could also come to invest in the country as a result of the trained and skillful workforce.
He stressed that Nigeria needed to make more investments in terms of improving the educational sector.
However, he lauded Nigeria’s hard earned democracy of the last 25 years, saying democracy had indeed brought dividends to Nigerians.
He said with democracy, government was able to revolutionalise the telecom industry in the country which led to massive investment in telecom infrastructure.
He mentioned the advent of telecom giants like MTN, Globacom, Etisalat, now Airtel among others which have dominated the Nigerian telecom market.
He said this brought affordable telecommunication services to almost every part of Nigeria, adding that there have been a lot of progress with Nigeria’s democracy of the past 25 years.
“There has also been tremendous progress made in the financial services sector, as new companies such as PayPal, Flutterwave, Opay, Moniepoint among others, have also emerged in the last few years.
“This have really revolutionalised financial services in a way, making e-commerce possible and with the advent of Fintech, people can now sit back in their homes and make orders in Jumia or Konga.
“Every market woman or man could have their Point of Sales(POS) and be able to accept credit card payments.
“These are all improvements in technology that emerged over the last several years as a result of democracy in the country,” Nwafor said.
He urged that government should continue to make more progress, to create more enabling environment, so that companies would continue to thrive and new ones to emerge.
He assured that with each of these companies comes jobs creation and innovations, which are what was needed in the economy.