What will you do to fix education so graduates can actually find jobs?

administration will decentralize power generation to lower electricity tariffs and remove import duties on essential machinery and production equipment. Q3: Employers say many graduates and polytechnic students do not have enough practical skills. How will you improve technical and vocational education and prepare young Nigerians for actual jobs? Answer: My administration will overhaul Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) curricula in partnership with industry leaders to match real job market requirements. It will establish modern vocational training hubs across all geopolitical zones, launch dual- apprenticeship programmes, and standardize national skill certifications. Q4: Many Nigerians are leaving the country because they cannot find opportunities at home.

Actualizing the Vision: The Northern Development Program (NDP). I created a special purpose vehicle known as the National Development Program to actualize this prioritization. We set up a Northern Educational Project under the chairmanship of Professor Adamu Beiki, supported by educationists like Mr. Tom Mataimaki Maiyashi and facilitated by Dr. Hamid Bobboyi, then Director of Arewa House. The team first went round to take stock of the state of our education in the North and found it to be in shambles. We had to start a program to revive our education, including the rewriting of inspectional manuals and running a series of capacity-building programs for teachers and educators across the North. We tried to restore the dignity of teachers and the teaching profession by instituting various motivation awards, such as a long-service award, which late Mallam Yahya Gusau won. By the end of our first term in office, many states had doubled their enrolments and boosted their transition rates. These records should be there in Arewa House, here in Kaduna.

I have therefore not come here simply to speak about your frustrations. You know those frustrations better than I do because you live with them every day. I have come to offer you a partnership to change the conditions that created them and to ask you to become active participants in building the Nigeria you deserve. THE NIGERIA YOUR GENERATION KNOWS Let us speak plainly. The Nigeria many young people experience today is very different from the Nigeria they were promised. You were taught that if you worked hard, obtained an education, obeyed the law and applied yourselves diligently, opportunity would follow. Many of you did exactly that. You studied through strikes and blackouts, only to graduate into an economy where a university degree does not guarantee a job and where even those fortunate enough to find work increasingly struggle to afford food, transportation and rent. You have watched talented friends and classmates - doctors, engineers, accountants, software developers and other professionals - pack their bags for Canada, the United Kingdom, America and elsewhere in search of opportunities their own country should be capable of providing.

Nigeria cannot continue asking competent young people to wait outside the room while their future is being decided inside it. MY COVENANT WITH YOU Our partnership must also mean something practical in the lives of young Nigerians. It begins with jobs and enterprise. Nigeria has millions of young people with ideas, energy and ambition, but too many cannot access the capital required to turn those ideas into businesses. We will expand transparent access to finance for young entrepreneurs, artisans, farmers, technology founders and people working in the creative economy. Your surname, political connection or ability to find a godfather should not determine whether a good idea receives an opportunity to succeed. Education must also change. We cannot continue educating young Nigerians for an economy that no longer exists. Our schools must place greater emphasis on science, technology, vocational education, agriculture, digital skills, critical thinking and entrepreneurship. And no brilliant Nigerian child should be denied tertiary education simply because his or her parents are poor.

The good news for Nigerian students is that Atiku has reviewed the current student-loan policy and believes education should not begin with a mountain of debt hanging over a young Nigerian’s future. His approach will reduce the underlying cost of education and, after review, provide forgiveness for qualifying student debts so that young Nigerians can graduate with hope rather than repayment burdens. Education should open doors, not mortgage the future. A student loan is not a scholarship. It is a liability. The proper test of an education policy is whether ordinary families can educate their children without being pushed into debt merely to keep them in school. When students increasingly require loans because the underlying cost of education has become prohibitive, government should not parade the loan itself as evidence that the system is working. And your attempt to frighten students and workers by claiming that Atiku’s targeted and capped production support will somehow destroy NELFUND, reduce salaries or reverse the minimum wage is a fallacious claim without a ledger behind it. If your government has the arithmetic, Bola, publish it. Show Nigerians, line by line, how a transparently budgeted subsidy tied to Nigerian crude and domestic refining suddenly empties NELFUND or workers’ pay packets.

● Within the first 100 days, declare a national emergency on out-of-school children and convene a National Education Summit to develop and implement a clear action plan ● Partner with states and local governments to identify and return out-of-school children to classrooms through targeted outreach ● Declare a state of emergency in technical and vocational education, expanding skills training centres and aligning them with industry needs ● Provide student loans and financing support to enable young Nigerians to access technical and vocational education. ● Integrate vocational training into secondary education to create multiple pathways for learning and employment 2. Reform UBEC for accountability and results We will restructure the Universal Basic Education system to ensure funds are efficiently used, transparently managed, and tied to measurable outcomes. Details: ● Reform the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) to focus on students, not fund administration. ● Simplify access to UBEC funds for states while enforcing strict accountability and reporting standards ● Digitize UBEC processes to track fund disbursement, school performance, and project implementation in real time