Ofodile: Economic Growth Impossible without Skills Acquisition
Mr. Ben Ofodile, a mechanical engineer and consultant who retired from Shell after 30 years of service, tells Crusoe Osagie that without vocational skills transfer, the nation’s economy will remain a lame duck. Excerpts: The government needs to support sk
My name is Ben Ofodile, I am a mechanical engineer by training and I retired after 30 years of services to Shell. Presently, I am running a consultancy with a couple of former colleagues in the oil and gas business.
I retired in 2010, with three colleagues, we set up Aspen Energy based in Lagos. We cover areas of surf surface services, engineering, consulting, as well as gas solutions, manpower supply and development. Those are the areas we provide services. We also provide services to International Oil Companies (IOCs), the medium sized companies and companies that have bought equities from the big companies.
However, there is another passion that I have committed myself to which has led me to see the inextricable link between vocational skills and sustainable economic growth and development. That passion is my work with prison inmates.
Having been engaged in various activities to help accelerate the spiritual and psychological rehabilitation of inmates, I came to realise that one area where they require emancipation is in the area of skills. It is a fact that most people who engage in criminal activities which lands them on the wrong side of the law often get entangled in crime out of idleness and the lack of productive ventures to commit themselves to. So when people are armed with vocational skills and abilities, they are able to chart new paths for themselves and live above boards.
Armed with this understanding I, along with my team started to make serious effort to ensure that prison inmates are not only helped with food and other handouts but also equipped with skills which they can depend on when they eventually gain their freedom and come back into society.
How beneficial is skill acquisition to the Nigerian economy This is one of my favourite topics, you know that in the past, we had schools for artisans, we had vocational schools where people go and learn how to do things with their hands and these schools were at every region in the country at that time, but what has happened to those places, they have all been converted to universities. So no longer do we have places where people can go to acquire technical skills. The country is only producing paper graduates who cannot really do anything with their hands, whereas I know that in those days, the likes of Yaba College of Technology and the college of technology in Rivers State, IMT in Enugu, which offer technical education for artisans. We do not all have to go the university, everyone does not have to go to the university because if everyone goes to the university, who are the ones to do the technical work.
The ministry of education in every country should be able to know how many people they need in the economy every year and that will be made of graduates such as engineers, technical people, artisans and the likes, so that our educational system will be structured like that and that was the reason we had schools in the past to help us fill the gaps, but now those schools are not there. If you want to get someone to do tiling in your house, you will have to look for those Togolese, Ghanaians to do that for you, but the question is why not Nigerians. Skills acquisition is key and any young person these days, even if you go and come out with a degree, I usually tell them to go and learn how to do something with their hands. The government needs to support skill acquisition programmes in the country. We need to start looking ahead to know how many engineers we need, how many doctors do we need so that we can channel people to their appropriate places of specialty, but if we do not do this, you will realise that all we need is just 20 engineers, but every year, we are graduating over a thousand engineers, what is going to happen to the rest.
Advice for government on the current dwindling oil price Well, there is really not much to advice the government or put it this way, there is nothing new that one can tell the government because we have always known what we really have to do which is to diversify our economy, because a situation where one commodity contributes more than 90 per cent revenue of a country, it is a recipe for disaster, because it then means that if anything happens to that commodity, then there is serious trouble which is exactly what we are going through. Those times when that commodity was selling very high, that was when we should have diversified our economy so that whatever we get from oil will only be one of the streams of the nation’s income and if the price of oil goes down, we will not really feel it the way we are currently experiencing it. If you look at a country like the US, with the price of oil going down, it is not even an issue in US and a couple of other places, but here since oil is the biggest revenue earner, this is why we are feeling the impact more.
Your engagement with the Nigerian Prisons We as members of the Knights of St Mulumba work in the area of prison ministry. If you know the injunction in the bible where it says that on that day, our Lord Jesus will ask you that when I was hungry you did you feed me, when I was in prison, did you visit me and the you say my Lord, when you were in prison I visited you and the Lord will say as long as you do that to my brethren, you did that unto me, so it is in line with that injunction that the knights of St Mulumba Lekki sub council took on the effort of prison ministry and basically what we do is that every quarter, all our members visit the prison and because our sub council is based in Lekki area, the nearest prison to us is the Ikoyi prison, so we go there and attend mass with them and at the end, we distribute food packs to prisoners after the mass but not only to the Catholics, but to the Anglicans and the Muslims. For the Catholics we take rosaries and prayer books to them at least we spend two hours with them and we do this quarterly. The idea is to let them know that people care, the fact that you ended up in prison does not necessarily mean that God has given up on you or your fellow human beings have given up on you. We want them to know that there is still hope out there. We do this to give them hope. We also have a group of lawyers who provide free legal advise to them to at least try to get them out because if you know how some of them end up there you will find out that they ended up in prison for ridiculous circumstances which just tells you that is because they do not have anyone. We want to let them know that they have someone in us. We have also paid school fees for some of them who are in National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). Recently, we got a letter from the Ikoyi prison asking us for donation to help some of the inmate take the Joint Administration Matriculation Board (JAMB) examination and we are going to comply with that. We are going to donate some money for that. We have realised that these inmates after serving their term or awaiting trials for many years, most of them do not have places to stay or do not have the means to get back home and according to statistics in United States, 50 per cent of people who leave the prisons, end up going back and you can imagine where they have in US all the support systems and so on and so forth and you still have that, imagine in Nigeria here where we do not have that, you will realise that a lot of them come out, end up going back there. So, one of the things we do is that at a minimum, we give them money to transport them from the prison back to their home and you know that Lagos is a cosmopolitan area where you do not have anyone here, it will be difficult to get someone to house or feed you and most of them do not have anyone here, so their best bet is going back home. So we give them transport fares to get them back home to their families. We also provide counselling to them. I have also counselled some of them to tell them that look, you are out of prison, that is the past, the future depends on you, you can take decisions to make your life different. We also highlight the problems and situations inside the prison and the things that get some of them into that prison. We have cases where some people stay in prison awaiting trials for a long time for ridiculous offences and we also try to convey all those difficulties and anomalies in the system to the federal government. In 2013, we had a prison conference at Muson centres where we brought people from different walks of life, we brought judges, lawyers, magistrates, people from Ministry of justice, immigration, prisons and the likes to brainstorm on ideas and the way forward. We also collaborate with other sub council because the way the Knights of St Mulumba is organised is along the same way the Catholic organises their own system
Success stories We have been doing this since 2010. It has been difficult to follow up on that because we found out that most of them after they are released, they travel out of the city and we encourage them to go home so that they can go and consolidate to get their lives back together again. We have not been able to follow up on their success, but we have a lot of them who have come back to say that they came to see us and also do thanksgiving. If you have been to the prisons and you listen to the stories of the people, you will marvel. It is okay for people to say that these people are criminals, thieves and all of that, some of them are but not all of them. Most of them end up in prisons because they have no one and you know some of these laws like wandering and I ask myself what exactly is wandering. These were laws put in place by our colonial masters to restrict us from coming to Government Residential Area (GRA), so that if you come around there, they will arrest you. These laws are still in the books and people are being arrested for such things. We also found out that when you go to the prisons, a prison that is supposed to take about 400 people, you get to see about 1600 people in there and more than 50 per cent of these inmates are awaiting trials. Some of them have been awaiting trials for over 5 years and they have not been taken to court. You will see in articles where lawyers and civil rights people challenge the government for holding some of these big politicians for more than 48 hours without taking them to court.