The Industrial Training Fund has been charged to create a curriculum that would help the youth think “outside the box” instead of looking for paid jobs.
The charge was made on Thursday in Jos, Plateau state by Senator Musiliu Obanikoro, the Chairman of ITF Governing Council and Minster of State for Defence, at the 2013 Merit Award ceremony of the Governing Council.
Obanikoro said: “What we need is creativity.
“We in the ITF must create a Nigerian dream that everybody will latch onto.”
He said that President Goodluck Jonathan had already provided the right platform for creativity, adding that the Fund needed to be known internationally.
“The major challenge in this country is that people cannot think outside the box,” Obanikoro said, and regretted that the activities of the Fund were underreported.
He said that he had noticed after working with the fund for the past eight years that it lacked publicity.
He added: “ITF is lacking in the area of publicity.
“We need to device a means of publicising the activities of the fund so that people will know what we are doing.”
In his speech, the ITF Director-General, Prof. Longmas Wapmuk, called for better funding for Students Industrial Work Experience Scheme and noted that the activities of the scheme had dropped due to lack of funds.
Wapmuk said: “I will seize this opportunity to once again reiterate our earlier appeals that a separate budgetary sub-head be created for the scheme in the federal budget.
“Our appeals have been necessitated by persistent under appropriation and non-release of such inadequate appropriations.
“This has occasioned a situation where students and supervisory allowances amounting to several billions are being owed.”
Wapmuk recounted the performance of the Fund in 2013 to include implementation of training activities for 334,331 Nigerians from 6,548 public and private organisations.
He said that 239,682 of the trainees were now fully employed, while 9,948 were either entrepreneurs or self-employed.
He said that the Fund embarked on 653 special intervention programmes from which 4,188 women benefited within the period.
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