“I Will Not Blame the Swimmer for the Width of the River”: Ochefu Defends Nigerian Graduates
Nigeria lends young people money to enter university but almost nothing to start a business when they leave, a former head of the vice-chancellors’ committee said Thursday, calling on the government to create a loan window built for graduate entrepreneurs.
Professor Yakubu Aboki Ochefu, a former Secretary-General of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian Universities, made the remarks while delivering the 10th Convocation Lecture of the Federal University Lokoja at the Multipurpose Hall, Felele Campus. His topic was “The Confluence Generation: The University, the Graduate and the Society That Must Become Our Laboratory.”
The university is graduating 5,638 students this week. “The graduate walks out of the gate owing the state and owning nothing,” Ochefu said.
Loans too small, too short
Ochefu, a professor of Economic History, credited the Federal Government for the Nigerian Education Loan Fund and the YouthCred programme of the Consumer Credit Corporation. He said neither was designed for graduates who want to build businesses.
He noted that the ₦47 billion the Corporation reports lending to about 300,000 young people works out to roughly ₦157,000 each. “That will buy a telephone. It will not buy a shredder for plastics, a cold room or a briquette press,” he said. Credit priced at about two per cent a month and repayable within months suits trading but cannot finance equipment, he added.
“We have announced the jobs and left out the finance” in the green and circular economy, he said.
He asked the Federal Government to open a Graduate Green Enterprise Window at the Bank of Industry or the Development Bank of Nigeria. It would offer single-digit interest, a five- to seven-year repayment term, a moratorium of at least one year, and equipment leasing instead of cash.
He also proposed accepting validated final-year projects as feasibility studies for a first loan backed by a credit guarantee. Other proposals include reserving a share of public contracts in waste collection, recycling and solar maintenance for graduate-owned firms, and deferring education-loan repayments for graduates who start registered enterprises.
Housing “for those who have already arrived”
Ochefu described the landlord’s demand for one or two years’ rent in advance as “the first capital requirement of adult life,” arriving before a first salary.
He pointed to Britain, where the government adds 25 per cent to the savings of first-time buyers under 40 and announced a £4.7 billion “Your First Home” equity loan scheme in its Budget of 28 October 2026.
By contrast, he said, the National Housing Fund has about six million contributors, while the Federal Mortgage Bank has been booking fewer than 500 mortgages. The newer MOFI Real Estate Investment Fund had lent ₦128 billion to 1,859 families by June, about ₦69 million each, to beneficiaries with an average age of 42. “Let us call it what it is, which is a scheme for those who have already arrived,” he said.
He proposed a First Home Savings Account within the National Housing Fund for Nigerians under 35, with government adding a quarter to every naira saved. He also called for rent-to-own terms on a reserved share of federal housing units, a starter equity loan, and state laws enforcing monthly or quarterly rent.
“Capital and a roof are what turn staying in Nigeria from an act of endurance into a reasonable choice,” he said.
Universities as “intelligence machines”
Ochefu said universities were designed to supply graduates to the state and kept that design after the state stopped hiring. “We went on producing for an employer who had left the building,” he said.
He said most Nigerian universities operate as warehouses of knowledge, which is received from elsewhere, stored in lecture notes and collected back in examinations. He proposed that they become “intelligence machines” that take in problems from their surroundings, work on them with the methods of their disciplines and deliver findings to people who can act on them.
The hundreds of thousands of final-year projects shelved every year, he said, are the country’s largest unused research workforce. He urged Federal University Lokoja to set up a “Confluence Problem Register” where governments, companies, market associations and traditional councils lodge pressing problems for departments to turn into project topics.
He called on every university to survey its graduates 12 to 18 months after convocation and publish the results.
AI and accreditation
On artificial intelligence, Ochefu said students had discovered that a machine would write their final-year projects and that detection software would not solve the problem. The answer, he said, is a project that sends the student into the community. A machine can write a literature review on flooding, but “it cannot stand in Ganaja in September, measure how high the water rose on the wall of a house and ask the owner what she lost.”
He also called for an end to rival accreditation, saying students may enrol in programmes approved by the National Universities Commission only to learn in their third year that the professional body does not recognise them. “The student is the casualty of a boundary dispute between two agencies of the same government,” he said, proposing joint panels with “one visit, one instrument and one verdict.”
Drawing on eight years in the Benue State Government, he recommended a Postgraduate Diploma and an M.Sc. in Implementation Science, open to graduates of any discipline. Each student would carry a stalled policy or project to delivery in place of a dissertation.
“Stay, Go or Log In”
Addressing parents, Ochefu said the degree no longer carries the job guarantee it once did. “You have kept your side of that bargain. You deserve to be told the truth about the other side,” he said, adding that this was “no fault of your child.”
To graduands, he set out three paths: stay in Nigeria, emigrate, or live in Nigeria and work online for clients abroad. “Some of my generation call it desertion, and I will not join them,” he said of emigration, while warning of fees, discounted certificates and distance from family. He declined to recommend one path. “You are adults, and the choice is yours.”
He refused to blame graduates for the labour market, noting that only about 14 of every 100 employed Nigerians are wage employees, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. “I will not stand here and blame the swimmer for the width of the river.”
Ochefu is also National Chairman of the Association of Nigerian University Alumni.
