Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, a frontline politician and business icon, has bemoaned the increasing rate of joblessness among the youths especially, young engineers who have just graduated from tertiary institutions with high academic grades.
Chief Iwuanyanwu spoke during a cash award session to 11 best graduating students of the engineering profession from various tertiary institutions across the country at the third edition of the Engr. Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu Annual Lecture Series held at the Imo Concorde Hotel, Owerri.
The event was organised by the Nigerian Society of Engineers, Owerri Branch Foundation.
“I feel very sad when I see these young professionals with high scores from their various higher institutions of learning, having graduated and when they come to me, you ask them and they say they have no job one year or two years after graduation,” he said.
The elder statesman who gave a cash award of N100,000 each to the 11 best engineering graduates expressed happiness in receiving them on the occasion and called on the state and Federal governments to design a system whereby distinguished graduates should be given jobs with a view to stopping the current capital flight and brain drain syndrome in the country as many of them leave for other countries in search of jobs.
He also commended Prof. Gloria Chukwudebe, the lecturer of the 2018 annual lecture series, for her intellectual prowess as well as the choice of this year’s topic, “Re-engineering the Nigerian Economy to Fast-Track Achievement of the SDGs” and the organisers of the annual event.
In her lecture, Prof. Chukwudebe recommended a robust monitoring and evaluation framework that tracks progress, identifies areas of concern and monitors financial resources allocated to the set priorities and assesses the overall impact of the key policies as crucial to the attainment of the sustainable development goals.
“Assessment and evaluation are very important because we can only manage what we can measure,” she stated.
The report was filed by Anolu Vincent and first published in Daily Independent
The joblessness is because Ingeniers, who are brainworkers, are often mistaken for handworkers and wrongly assigned to tactical duties they were never trained for while their professional assignments are ignorantly constituted into capital projects and awarded to (handworker) contractors who end up either doing an inferior job or abandon the project after partial or full payment.
These young Ingeniers are then branded as incompetent by their detractors and those of us who are suppose to know but do not.
For clearity of facts; Ingeniers are brainworkers who define how nonexisting but needed things can be realized into existence with or without an ideal situation – of skills, materials, and equipment.