By Franca Ofili
Abuja – Nigeria spends at least one billion dollars on overseas trainings, according to Centre for Management Development (CMD).
The Director-General of the centre, Dr Kabir Usman, said at a News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) Forum in Abuja that not less than 200,000 Nigerians usually attended overseas training.
“At least not less than 200,000 Nigerians go for overseas training.
`In each of them, you don’t spend less than 10,000 dollars because you have to pay for the DTA, you have to pay for the air ticket, and you have to pay for the school fees.
“If you look at this, definitely it is not going to be less than 10,000 dollars.
Let’s just assume that it’s not 10,000 dollars, but 5,000 dollars, and if there are only 200,000 Nigerians out of 186 million population now, you will see that 200,000 is a drop in the ocean.
“If you multiply 5,000 dollars by 200,000 that is going to give you one billion dollars, so we spend about one billion dollars for overseas trainings.
“If you translate that on an exchange rate of N300 per dollar, we are talking of about N300 billion.
He said at the end of 2014, there was a directive from the Office of the Head of Service, in conjunction with Secretary to the Government to domesticate and localise training.
Usman said the local content agenda was in terms of capacity application.
He stated that it is a different matter whether or not Nigeria achieved the objective of the agenda.
According to him, if the country can domesticate one per cent of N300 billion spent on overseas training, it will create one million jobs for Nigerians.
He said the centre had written to the Office of the Head of Service and the Secretary of Government to allow it to gate keep because it had a database of all the list of training programmes accredited by CMD.
Usman said the centre could advise on training programme that could be done in Nigeria where resource persons would be invited from outside the country to carry out the training.
He said the centre conducted training needs assessment across all the states of the federation and that it got startling revelations.
Usman said some of the civil servants had not been trained for the past five to 15 years.
According to him, if the government can use its resources in an innovative way by promoting local content, everybody will be trained.
He said the training of the entire workforce could not be achieved due to lack of national training policy.
“We should be able to train everybody but the disturbing thing why we cannot do that is because we don’t have the national training policy.
“There is no national training policy for the country because if you employ somebody and there is a policy that the person must be trained, the story is going to be different.’’
Usman called on civil servants and government parastatals intending to study or send people abroad for training to contact the centre for advice.
He said the centre would let such civil servants and government parastatals know if the training could be done in Nigeria.
Usman said that 80 per cent of what the country was doing could be domesticated in Nigeria.
