The Director General of the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency, (SMEDAN), Alhaji Bature Umar Masari, has urged students in Nigerian universities to endeavour to set up entrepreneurship clubs in their respective university so as to imbibe the spirit of entrepreneurship while they are still in the school environment.
Alhaji Bature stated this when he hosted students from the Economics Department of the Adamawa State University, Mubi, Adamawa State, who were on an excursion visit to the Agency’s head office in Abuja.
He said the agency had last year in conjunction with the National Universities Commission (NUC) launched the Universities Entrepreneurship Development Programme (UNEDEP) so as to encourage Nigerian students to imbibe the spirit of entrepreneurship, saying that all Nigerian universities are expected to key into the programme.
Masari said students of tertiary institutions should begin to redirect themselves on how to better their lives by embracing entrepreneurship and job creation strategies because the problem of unemployment being faced in the country now was caused by the age long neglect of enterprise development and creation of jobs for the Nigerian Youths and this has increased the rate of social vice such as, kidnapping, insurgency, and prostitution, admonishing the students to emulate the footsteps of big entrepreneurs like Dangote, Tony Elumelu and others who started small and improved their business to transnational status.
Masari noted that government cannot create all the jobs needed to employ everyone, saying it is only the private sector that has the capacity. “Look at the developed countries like China, Japan, and USA; it is their private sector through the encouragement of MSME, which created major jobs that employed a larger percentage of the people.
The Director General further implored the students to put into practice what they have learnt from the lecture they received from SMEDAN, adding that they are now SMEDAN Ambassadors saddled with the responsibility of telling those that were not on the visit the mandate of the agency.
Leader of the Team, Mr. Enam Abalis, said the purpose of the excursion was to enable the student to understand the mandate and workings of SMEDAN.
“We are here to learn and know how to be independent and be self reliant, because all the students here are in their final year and they will soon join the labour market, as such, they need to abreast themselves on how to create job and run their business successfully,” he said.
