Transforming education into business and economic skills. – Interview with Dr Dahiru Sani (PART 2)

Your GIPED Programme is fascinating. Please tell us about it. And what makes you think that’s what our youth and students need?

Thank you very much for this brilliant question. We’ve been working on GIPED for two years now. Hopefully, some people are beginning to listen to us. So what is GIPED? GIPED is basically targeted at that graduate who should be better utilized in society but finds himself working as a bartender. He is underemployed. He is that mathematics graduate who should be very useful within the science and technology field but earns his living as an Uber driver. He’s underemployed and he’s frustrated. He does that for five, seven years, becomes psychologically demented and becomes depressed. After some time, he thinks about his mates who have gone far so he joins a gang and begins to kidnap people for ransom. So what we’re saying in GIPED is that we love the educational system. We’re not challenging the educational system. We love the educational system that is diverse, that speaks to people in arts, speaks to people in sciences and speaks to people in philosophy. Brilliant. What we’re saying is that the educational system needs to advance a bit further. There is value in going into a discipline. What I mean by this is that, if I invest four or five years of my life in reading history, along the way, I will become attached to history and will begin to love it. Even if history was not my first choice and I had actually wanted to read medicine. But that investment over time, attending lectures, passing exams, getting a receipt, iteration over the years and so on and so forth, will make me say wait a minute, I’ve invested in this thing therefore I should be able to benefit from it. All right? So you finish your degree programme and they hand you a certificate. And you suddenly find that you are running from pillar to post.