Dr Kabir Usman, Director-General, Centre for Management Development (CMD), says Nigeria needs very skilled manpower to develop the country’s infrastructure.
Usman said in a statement by CMD consultant, Abdulkadir Ahmed on Tuesday in Abuja, that there was a huge gap in the areas of power, agriculture, construction and the like in the country that needed to be filled.
The director general said the mandate of the centre was to ensure standard training programmes that would boost capacity, proffer solutions to manpower shortage and thus develop infrastructure in the country.
He said the centre would organise regular events for the public and private sectors to discuss areas of common interest, trends and current capacity building programmes.
“This is with a view to do need assessment survey and proffer solutions in areas where we have shortage of skilled manpower.
“The CMD acts as a secretariat and we provide all the relevant background information to make/formulate policies, review policies and design policies for the country in areas of management education.
“We provide consultancy services so we can show the way in terms of high quality and the standard of what is expected by consultants to actually practise across the country.
“The centre also conducts research in all aspect of management education in order to understand the Nigeria situation; to see where skills needs to be addressed, where there is shortage in skilled manpower and we proffer solutions.
“Our vision of course is very clear; we want to be the centre of excellence that promotes management education and we want to provide quality education in the country,’’ Usman said.
According to Usman, the centre has trained over 3,000 participants in the areas of leadership, strategic management, project management, result- based monitoring and evaluation framework and on issues of emotional intelligence.
The director general said CMD had done quite a lot of training for the various consultants in the country to make sure that they adhered to ethical code of practice.
“We ensure they do what they are supposed to do; they are guided ethically and that they have the competences in terms of analysis and identification of areas of skilled gaps.
“We have also gone throughout all the 36 states plus the FCT; we conducted training needs assessment for Departments of planning research and statistics across the federation.
“We have produced research reports, we produced interim reports, we are now analysing the data to produce a final report and it is that report that we are going to send to all the state governors.
The CMD boss said the centre had produced a brochure of about 120 programmes that would act as a direction to all management consultant developers in the country.
On recession, Usman stated that the country got out of recession due to the effect of the Federal Government’s Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP).
He, however, noted that the ERGP was only a medium term plan, adding that the private and public sectors had a role to play to fully get the country out of recession.
Usman said “ that role includes provision of infrastructure, diversification of the economy, getting the right micro economic framework and also ensuring that there is prudence, frugality, transparency and accountability in the economy.
“We cannot deliver this plan without skilled manpower, so capacity is very important and that is why we must understand where there is need to build capacity so that we can deliver the dividends of democracy in that respect.’’ (NAN)