A Researcher with Lagos Business School, Dr Jubril Salaudeen, has urged governments at all levels to address issues of poverty and insecurity by encouraging education and skills acquisition.
Salaudeen, also a business strategist, made the appeal in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Saturday in Lagos.
The don, who noted that he had been researching into the menace of poverty in the last 13 years, advised government do more in the area of poverty alleviation and insecurity.
“The first thing to tackle poverty and insecurity is massive investment in education and skills acquisition for youths, to enable them contribute to national development and earn a living.
“The government is not doing enough. I think fundamentally, government needs to do more in the area of education, the education that we have today is not functional.
“You find young Nigerians graduating from the university, some of them are uninformed. This is not good for us; it is not the way to go.
“We see people graduating from electrical engineering, who know nothing about electricity, some from mechanical engineering, who know nothing about automobiles,’’ Salaudeen said.
The don, who described poverty as inability to take care of basic requirements like; food, clothing, housing and health, said that the poverty index in Nigeria was high.
According to him, poverty can be due to physical handicap, lack of access to good education or right form of education, generational circle, among others.
He urged youths to change their focus from drugs to secure their future and rescue themselves from impoverishment.
Salaudeen also urged the youth to look into agriculture, adding that Islam and other religions encourage their adherents to take to agriculture because of its prospects.
“Agriculture must be developed to feed ourselves and also for export, to earn foreign exchange.
“This will help to take us out of poverty as well as make us better people,’’ he said.
Salaudeen, also advocated for the exposure of Nigerian women to better education, to enable them contribute their quota to development.
The don urged the government to look into the issue of security, to restore confidence in school children in crisis prone parts of the country.
“We have the issue of insecurity that has taken a lot of children out of school.
“Where people are afraid that they can be in school and be kidnapped or killed, of course it will send them out of school,” he added.
