President Muhammadu Buhari has been conferred with an Honorary Doctorate degree of Letters by Kaduna State University.
Buhari got the honorary doctorate on Saturday during the second Convocation ceremony of the University in Kaduna.
Other awardees are Governor of Kaduna Nasir El-Rufai and Alhaji Aliko Dangote.
Speaking at the occasion, the President commended the institution’s development strides in terms of academic excellence and inculcating discipline in the students within its 11 years of existence.
He suggested a review of the academic approaches owing to reports that about 80% of the graduates from Nigerian universities find it very difficult to get employment every year, partly due to the curricula of the universities and other tertiary institutions which lay emphasis on training for white-collar jobs.
President Buhari said that Nigeria would need to increasingly globalize education through entrepreneurship if it would reduce the high rate of unemployment and poverty in the country.
The President pushed the point further by mandating that all university students in Nigeria, regardless of their major, would need to study entrepreneurship during the academic career.
He promised that his administration would embark on programmes that will ensure that youths are gainfully employed as part of efforts to reduce unemployment and insecurity in the country.
The Nigerian economy, historically, has depended largely on oil revenues. As the country tries to diversify away from dependence on oil, the President maintained that entrepreneurship remains key to the future of the country’s socioeconomic development.
This he noted could only be achieved if the youths are inculcated with the necessary skills and knowledge to be independent right from their days in school.
Business mogul, Aliko Dangote, was also honoured with an honorary doctorate degree along with the other awardees.
The second convocation of the Kaduna State University is for students who graduated from the institution between 2012 to 2015 academic sessions.
Since its establishment in 2005, the University has continued to develop both in terms of infrastructure and academic excellence with 38 out of the 4,000 graduates conferred with first class in various disciplines.
The University’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Barnabas Quirix said that this feat could not have been achieved without the strong foundation laid by the management and support from government.
Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna, while eulogizing the successes so far recorded by the university in the area of entrepreneurship and leadership programmes, gave the assurance that his government would continue to support state owned tertiary institutions to develop by increasing their annual grants and employing additional staff.
-Vanguard