The Director, Centre for Entrepreneurial Studies (CENTS), Professor Olufemi Onifade, has offered a way out of the high rate of unemployment ravaging the nation. The Professor, an ardent advocate of entrepreneurship in Nigeria, lamented that tertiary institutions produced thousands of graduates yearly, adding that 99 per cent of these graduates go about looking for the non-existent jobs and advised that “one can make do with what one can do with the hands”, adding that “it’s one thing to know how to do something, it’s another thing to make it beneficial to oneself and to one’s immediate environment”.
“If you want your service or product to get acceptability, you have to know who, what, how and where your product is highly needed. Then, you aim at that. Someone who is going to be in an enterprise has to be creative. Think of where his/her product will sell and make use of all available opportunities to expose himself/herself to the world”, he stated. The Director of CENTS observed that everyone was a stakeholder in entrepreneurship and should be prepared to create jobs in that some “people are into a particular vocation because they grow with their parents in that particular profession and they also have passion for it”.
Professor Onifade called on the government to create the enabling environment for small scale businesses to thrive, urging the youths to change their orientation from the preconceived notion that vocation in craft-making was meant for certain categories of graduates. Speaking about Auto-Mechanics, he said “don’t leave the vocation for people who didn’t go to school at all, or people who just finished primary school. There is nothing wrong for a graduate or diploma holder to go into it, provided such persons would end up being better trained”, he advised.