• Says, “Fifteen-Year-Old Curricula Must Be Replaced With Smart, Industry-Driven Skills”
Professor Idris Muhammad Bugaje is the Executive Secretary of the National Board for Technical Education. Since assuming office, he has championed far-reaching reforms to reposition Technical and Vocational Education and Training in Nigeria, with a strong focus on curriculum modernization, skills relevance, and stronger industry linkages.
Under his leadership, the National Board for Technical Education has prioritized the review of long-outdated curricula, strengthened the Sector Skills Council framework, and pushed for eighty percent hands-on training in National Diploma and Higher National Diploma programmes to bridge the widening gap between training institutions and industry. Professor Bugaje has also been vocal on the need to make technical education attractive to young Nigerians by integrating smart agriculture, digital technologies, and entrepreneurship into teaching and learning.
His efforts culminated in the recently held National Workshop on the Review of Agricultural Curricula for Polytechnics and Colleges of Agriculture, backed by a historic One Billion Naira intervention sourced from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund by the Minister of Education, the Minister of State for Agriculture, and the Minister of Livestock Development.
On the sidelines of the workshop, Professor Bugaje granted an exclusive interview to the Editorial Team of TVET NEWS MONITOR, an official publication of the Board, under the leadership of its Group Editor-in-Chief, Waziri Isa Adam and Muhammad Muntazar. During the interview, Professor Bugaje spoke on the workshop, what prompted it, the shocking deficits uncovered by the Board’s skills gap analysis, and how the curriculum review will reposition agriculture as a modern, smart, and attractive career path for Nigerian youths.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* Sir, you’ve been advocating for many progressive programs and policies at the National Board for Technical Education, and even before you became the head of the National Board for Technical Education. Now the topical issue is the change of curriculum for polytechnic programmes, which you’ve said have been outdated for so long — over fifteen years. So what specific courses are you really worried about?
*ES, NBTE:* Well, generally, curricula in our Nigerian polytechnics and allied institutions have been neglected for very long. Many of them are fifteen years or more without review, and the standard practice is to review curricula every five years. This has been due to budgetary constraints.
As you are aware, we received nothing for 2025 and 2026. In 2024, curriculum review was done but not yet paid for. So these are the challenges.
This time, it is the Federal Ministry of Education — the Minister of Education himself — who found it necessary, along with two other ministers, to act. They sourced about One Billion Naira from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund and directed that we should review agricultural curricula, because admissions into agriculture have been going down for a very long time. The curricula are not attractive.
So this time, we are trying to modernize it, bring in new topics like smart agriculture, so that young people can be attracted to the agricultural profession.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* Sir, do you have any data that you can present to the reading public to show that this decline is real?
*ES, NBTE:* The decline is real because we carried out a skills gap analysis, and we found very wide gaps between what industry needs and what institutions are training students in.
Wide gaps in forestry, wide gaps in livestock, wide gaps in crop production, wide gaps in fisheries. For example, if you take animal husbandry, the total number of artificial insemination technicians in the whole country is below two hundred. Most of them were even trained outside the country, some on the job.
So this is a very serious deficit. A country with hundreds of millions of cattle, with such a low number of skilled technicians. This is one area among many others that we have identified.
So we are now trying to upgrade all these curricula, introduce more hands-on skills training, and train agricultural technologists and technicians so they can operate based on industry needs, rather than using very archaic curricula as in the past.
We’ve already identified the gaps — that was the first step we took. That has been done. And now, we are reviewing the curricula to bridge those gaps.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* In what ways has the outdated curriculum contributed to the widening skills gap?
*ES, NBTE:* Well, the outdated curricula were not delivering because, number one, agriculture today is smart. People are using modern technologies in different aspects of agriculture.
The use of cutlasses and hoes is in the past, yet students are never exposed to these technologies. They just come and do the theories, then they leave. When they go to industry, they have to be trained all over again, as if they had come from no school at all. That is the situation now.
We are changing that narrative. We are now saying that when you come to a college of agriculture, you will be taught real hands-on skills based on modern technology, so that when you graduate, you can even set up on your own. You don’t even need to be looking for jobs. You can set up on your own.
Agriculture is the mainstay of the nation. It contributes more than twice what oil and gas has given Nigeria. It is the largest employer of labour in Nigeria. It is the mainstay in the sense that as long as human beings continue to live in this country, and not robots, agriculture shall remain the mainstay, because everybody needs to feed to survive.
And that’s why we shouldn’t joke with agriculture. It’s an area that, if well-managed, can be the leading foreign exchange earner for Nigeria. The produce from Nigeria everywhere in the world are world-class, and we just don’t seem to understand that potential. Through this retraining and the new curricula we are introducing, Nigeria will become a hub in the near future, so that all over the world, people will come here to get experts in these different skills.
They will also be able to get products that the world demands. So it’s going to have a lot of implications across the board. And this is one major achievement of this new government, which has been around for about three years. We must give them credit for this effort. Otherwise, agriculture has been lying in the cooler, I would say, for the past almost three to four decades.
It’s only now we are trying to reinvent it, re-engineer it, so that it can serve the nation better.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* Sir, do you see the government committed to making agriculture what you think it should be? I mean, the level of commitment?
*ES, NBTE:* I am confident they have the commitment. You see, agriculture is in the concurrent list like education, like electricity generation, and others.
So, it shouldn’t be only the Federal Government. Our state governments should make agriculture their number one agenda so that we can create more employment and more value chains. Because when you produce cows and you have to take them live elsewhere, you are losing so much. If you have downstream processing industries that will take the milk, convert it into yogurt, produce cheese, produce many other products, take the beef, process it, dry it, package it for export — this is the kind of agriculture we are looking into.
When you go to crop production, when you produce maize, how do you convert it and add value to it? So that people will not just be coming and buying grains here in the north; they’ll be buying products that are made from maize, rather than the maize itself. The same thing with rice and all other products.
We need to look into that value chain. That’s what we are trying to introduce now into agriculture. Agriculture is beyond the farm. The downstream industries are amazing. They can really turn around the fortunes of the Nigerian economy. And with this, the rural areas will even become more attractive. The drift to urban areas will be reduced.
I’m very sure this government is committed. And in any case, our states should even be more committed, because northern states especially are the food basket of the whole country, if not for the whole of West Africa. So they need to also invest more into agriculture, so that we can increase our yields, train our young people, and let them take more interest in agriculture. In this way, we will be empowering the local economies across the northern states.
At the moment, we are bedeviled by insecurity and poverty simply because agriculture has been neglected. That is set to change. Government cannot do it all for us.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* There is this opinion that Nigerian businessmen should venture into agriculture. Do you see key players keying into that?
*ES, NBTE:* Surely, agriculture across the world is being driven by the private sector.
And that’s why in every workshop you are observing here at the National Board for Technical Education, we have private companies involved. During the skills gap studies, we invited them, we identified them, and some of them are being invited to participate and share their experiences. The private sector has to participate. We have what we call the Sector Skills Council in agriculture. It’s private sector driven.
They are members of this review committee. So they are running this review of curricula. They are very important, because the industry is private-sector based. So their participation is very critical. Government will only create the enabling environment. The private sector is the one that is supposed to drive agriculture.
But one has to give a word of caution. There are vested interests in agriculture from overseas. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Monsanto Group, and others, have killed agriculture in Latin America. They have introduced genetically modified organisms. They have introduced many thingsgsgsgsgsgsgs so that you lose control of your food security. That is what Nigeria will not allow.
We will not allow foreign vested interests to play any role in our revitalization of agricultural curriculum and practice, so that we don’t lose control. If you lose control of agriculture, then you have become re-enslaved, re-colonized by those powers. And this is what we are not going to allow to happen in this country.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* Sir, these globalists that you just talked about are everywhere. They have been trying to impose their will on governments of different countries, especially in Africa. They are also in Nigeria, sir. As an example, even in the cabinet, you have their representatives. So what do you think we need to do as a country to stay away from their machinations?
*ES, NBTE:* Well, everybody knows their evil machinations. They have used colonialism initially. It has gone. They have used imperialism to control countries. It is now over. Iran has confirmed to the world that if you stand on your feet, you can beat the most powerful nation in the world.
So, all those are over. Now, their last card is food. If they can control our food security, then they can enslave us again. And this is what we are not going to allow. This curriculum review will be done in such a way that Nigeria will take full control of its agriculture and will not allow foreign interests, Bill and Melinda Gates or whatever name you give them, to come and meddle in our agriculture and drive us back into the pastttttt.
That will not be allowed.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* Sir, in terms of getting feedback from industry about the lack of capacity of graduates in that sector, how do you get this feedback? Do you conduct research to know how industries are faring, or do they write inspection reports to complain about what they see?
*ES, NBTE:* Well, as a regulatory body, we do that. From time to time, we send out questionnaires. We try to get feedback from industries, and the results are very alarming, very serious. Industries are complaining that graduates of Colleges of Agriculture are going to industry without the requisite skills.
We have made every effort for the past five years to find a solution to this through budgetary allocation. Since I came into this office, we have only received about Fifty Million Naira annually between 2021 to 2024. Fifty Million Naira to review 320 curricula. It’s impossible. Even if you review one-fifth of that 320, you are dealing with about 63 per annum.
Fifty million cannot review 63 curricula. At best, it may review five or six. Ten percent of what is allocated. So funding has been our main challenge. And that’s why we have to thank the Honourable Minister of Education. He said since you don’t have a budget to do this, let’s get a special intervention from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund. TETFund is spending trillions. This year, One Point Six Trillion Naira.
So he said, “Let’s get One Billion Naira so that we can review National Diploma and Nigeria Certificate in Education curricula, as well as university curricula.” Initially, the universities were dragging their feet, so he directed them that they must comply. We should review their curricula. They can decide on the date they want to implement it.
So we do those studies. We carry them out from time to time, but we are constrained by budgets. We cannot implement what we need to do because the budgetary allocations are very poor. And as I told you, 2024, up to now, half of the money has not been released, yet work has been completed. 2025, we’ve got zero. 2026, there isn’t much hope. Probably in 2027 after the elections, the budgets may come back on stream.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* Sir, what are the key terms of reference for this review committee?
*ES, NBTE:* Well, the main terms of reference is basically to look at the Nigerian agricultural industry, look at the best global practices, and to bring our curricula to that level. That’s the main objective and the main term of reference.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* What is the expected time of delivery for the terms of reference?
*ES, NBTE:* Well, timing is left to us because the committee had wanted to finish this work before May 29th, so that government can announce it as one of the major achievements. But we realized we may do a shoddy job. So we said, “Let us do these skills gap studies very well.”
We went round all the six geopolitical zones. Virtually every state of the federation. Visited the industries, discussed with the practitioners, understood the challenges in those industries. We compiled the report, we had a workshop, we critiqued that report. Now we have a document showing skills gaps in agriculture, and now we are going to use that document to upgrade the existing curricula.
We’re upgrading about 32 National Diploma, Higher National Diploma and Nigeria Certificate in Education curricula. We are creating eight new ones, brand new ones within these workshops. We are going to develop new national occupational standards, about 30. And we are going to eventually review about eight Bachelor of Agriculture degree curricula. That will give us almost close to 50 or 60.
So this is a very good number and we are very confident this work will really transform agriculture in the near future in Nigeria.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* Sir, how are you ensuring this review doesn’t become another exercise in futility for Nigerian agriculture?
*ES, NBTE:* Well, the regulatory bodies will insist that once we review it, from next session, all National Diploma and Higher National Diploma programmes in every polytechnic and college of agriculture must use the new curriculum. The only thing we could have asked is how do we train the lecturers and how do we upgrade them so that they can deliver on the new curriculum?
That is the second aspect of this workshop. At the end of the exercise, if any savings are made, we are going to organize workshops to train and retrain our lecturers and technologists in colleges of agriculture on these modern methods. Because you cannot deliver what you don’t have. So we are working towards that, and hopefully, it will be a complete package.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* The old curriculum was heavy on theory. What percentage of the new curriculum will be practical, field based, or industry attachment?
*ES, NBTE:* Well, the new curriculum will be eighty percent hands-on. Only twenty percent theory. There will be need for them to acquire even Nigerian Skills Qualifications in those skills. If you put them just in the curriculum like that, they may not get the correct hands-on.
They may just, again, do the theories in class. They may not do the practicals. But we are insisting that the awarding body in the agriculture sector will come and assess their skills. And they must obtain a National Skills Qualification certificate in those areas of skills. And without it, they will not even graduate. Even if they pass all the theories, they must pass the skills tests and assessment before we can graduate them.
So it’s a new paradigm.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* Sir, how would the review address entrepreneurship so that National Diploma and Nigeria Certificate in Education graduates see agriculture as a business, not just as a civil service subject?
*ES, NBTE:* Yes, agriculture is a big business. Not even a small one. A very big business. And therefore, entrepreneurship education is already in the curriculum. The only thing is we are going to review how to deliver it better.
It has already been embedded in the current curriculum, but the delivery has not been very efficient. So we are going to insist that every college of agriculture or polytechnic offering agriculture must provide the necessary workshops and labs. They must provide the tools and so on. That’s why we are introducing the Nigerian Skills Qualification.
They have to do the training, they have to be assessed by an external body to confirm that they have those skills before they can be graduated.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* Sir, what retraining and industry exposure plans does the National Board for Technical Education have for lecturers who have been teaching the same outdated document for over fifteen years?
*ES, NBTE:* We have always encouraged sabbatical in industry. We have always encouraged it and we will continue to encourage it. Our lecturers, when they are going for sabbatical leave, sometimes they just go to another academic institution. There’s nothing new to learn from an academic institution. So it’s better you go to an industry.
Even if they don’t pay you much, the fact that you are getting salary from the parent institution, you will be able to acquire new skills. When you come back to the institution, you can then deliver them to your students. So we are encouraging industry collaboration, so that industry sabbatical will be encouraged among lecturers.
We attempted to do that for non-agricultural programs through the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria two or three years ago. It didn’t go well because Manufacturers Association of Nigeria was complaining that they had been kicked out of governing councils of polytechnics. So we are trying to address that in the new amendment, so that Manufacturers Association of Nigeria will come back to our boards.
In the same way, agricultural industries will also be brought back to governing boards of agricultural colleges, so that we can synergize together. Our lecturers should be allowed to go to industry, acquire field experience, and come back to impact it on the students.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* President Tinubu’s administration declared a state of emergency on food and security. How does this curriculum review directly align with that agenda? And what impact targets do you think it will achieve up to 2027?
*ES, NBTE:* Well, a lot of emergencies have been declared. But I think this one is a very serious one, because we are looking at the fundamentals. We are looking at the curricula. If you have the wrong curricula, whatever emergency you declare, you cannot deliver anything different.
So for that reason, I think this time, the state of emergency on agriculture will really change agriculture completely. It is going to change it from its roots, from the curricula of training, from national occupational standards that we are developing, so that those practitioners will have the correct skills.
And we are going to see a turn-around in the food security of this country. So surely, this time, it will be different.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* Sir, youth apathy towards agriculture is high. Beyond curriculum, what complementary policies does the National Board for Technical Education intend to see the Federal Government do, so that graduates of these programs can be self-employed?
*ES, NBTE:* After the review of the curricula, we are going to give publicity. And that’s why you are even interviewing me now. We are going to give publicity to these new skills that are being embedded into agricultural programs so that people will now come and see how technology is being used to drive agriculture — greenhouses, soilless farming, use of drones, use of several other technologies that achieve better results in agriculture.
And also, agricultural marketing. There is a lot of potential for Nigerian mangoes. You don’t find any mango as sweet as Nigerian mangoes across the world. Our sweet potato is better than anyone else. And yet, we don’t even understand where to market these products. So we are going to teach these young people so that the whole approach to agriculture is bound to change.
So this time, by God’s grace, we are going to turn around the narrative for agriculture.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* In summary, sir, what do you anticipate to see after three years from now?
*ES, NBTE:* Well, after three years from now, we expect enrolment in colleges of agriculture to increase significantly. One of the reasons for this review was because enrolment was going down.
We are also looking forward to taking agriculture admissions outside Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board. What is the use of Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, with all its theoretical exams, to take somebody for agriculture? It’s not the best. If you have to give them any exam, take them to the field. See how they can hold a cutlass or a hoe. See how they can operate hydroponics or how they can tend plants.
So the government is going to change this. We are going to move colleges of agriculture outside Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board so that admissions can be done based on credits. Four credits will be needed and they will be admitted. What we need is the passion for agriculture. We want young people with passion to come into agriculture. Because this is the only way you can get people who will be motivated.
Not people who are there just by accident or by compulsion. We want people who are passionate for agriculture. And by the time the economic situation improves in the next three years or so, more people will be coming in. So there will be long queues to enter agricultural colleges, unlike what is happening now. So we are very hopeful that these changes are going to bring tremendous re-engineering of agriculture.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* Sir, any message for stakeholders in agriculture?
*ES, NBTE:* Stakeholders, please, you need to support this change. We need to improve. State governments especially, and even the private sector, let us upgrade facilities in our colleges of agriculture. Some of them are as old as colonial Nigeria. Some of them don’t have anything modern if you go to the workshops and the laboratories. Let us please mobilize our resources.
Corporate social responsibilities — the Dangotes, the Isyaku Rabius, the Elumelus, and so on. Let’s mobilize the resources. Let’s invest into agriculture. Investing into agriculture is investing into our future, a sustainable future for Nigeria.
*TVET NEWS MONITOR:* Thank you, sir. Wonderful interview, as usual, sir.
*ES, NBTE:* My pleasure, Editor