Osinbajo: Nigeria cannot continue to use classrooms alone to train the youth

Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo says Nigeria cannot continue to rely on classrooms alone to train young people.

He said the nation’s youth must be connected “to knowledge and innovation all over the world” through the internet.

Osinbajo made the comments on Thursday while giving a keynote address at the Google for Nigeria event.

Commenting on the launch of Google Station, a free public WiFi service, he said: “Today, 60 percent of the unemployed in Africa are young people. If we do not change the trajectory of socio-economic development, we will have millions of jobless young people in the prime of their lives.

“What that will mean is that there will be a largely illiterate, largely poorly trained population. The workforce will be ill-equipped to mount any industrial revolution or to take advantage of technology.

“The anger, disillusionment and hopelessness will drive unrest. It will compel more desperate migration northwards and present a fertile recruiting ground for all sorts of extremist groups. If social conditions remain tenuous, even the well educated will be tempted to migrate and that will, of course, contribute further to the brain drain.

The vice-president said technology is the way out of most of Africa’s problems, noting that the internet was used to facilitate the N-Power recruitment and payment process.

He said: “Technology companies literally hold the future of humanity in their hands. We in Nigeria cannot train nearly 200 million young people by 2025 in classrooms alone. It’s impossible.

“We must use the internet and even mobile telephony. We must connect our young people to knowledge and innovation all over the world. It will be impossible to use classrooms alone to train the numbers that we are dealing with today.

“We just have to use technology one way or the other. Co-creation efforts of innovators and inventors require broadband to be consummated. So, without connectivity, the development trajectory of our nation and our continent is truncated.”

He described the launch of Google Station as an “enormously significant event”.