6th June 2024
Acting Rector of Plateau State Polytechnic Barkin Ladi, Dr. Clement Chirman, has said that the plan to replace the higher national diploma (HND) with a bachelors degree in technology (B.Tech) will remove the discrimination between polytechnic and university graduates in the country.
He said that the plan will also bolster technical education and make polytechnic self-reliant since the course structure will be distinctive and should have a lot of content on practicals and skills innovations.
Speaking with our correspondent in his office in Barkin Ladi, near Jos, Chirman said that graduates from polytechnics should be judged by their output and not by their environment they study.
He said, “I recently attended a national dialogue on the future of HND holders. And, you know, that has been my area; fighting dichotomy. I believe that you should allow these graduates to be judged by their output, not by the name of their environment. Let them be judged by what they can do. You don’t judge somebody because he’s a polytechnic graduate. You think, nothing good will come out of him. That’s wrong. Allow them to be judged by what they can do. And that’s why the normal system does.”
Chirman said that though dichotomy has been removed, which now makes HND graduates have the same point of entry into public service with university graduates, there is need to change the attitude of discriminating between them.
“Dichotomy have been removed and HND and degree holders now have the same entry point now, level eight, in the civil service. The issue now is the discrimination of HND holders. And that’s why the new debate is that if the Nigerian society does not see anything good in HND, let us scrap it, replace HND with B Tech. After a diploma, and the qualification for going into the B Tech is a national diploma; you will now go in for Bachelors degree in Technology direct and not through JAMB. And that is the new push. The National Board for Technical Education has keyed into it. Co-Heads have keyed into it, Other stakeholders have keyed into it. Ours should be distinctive and it should have a lot of content on skills, practicals, and that should be the distinction between a polytechnic and a university.
“If you are coming into the B. Tech and by the time you get the degree, you should have practical experience, you should know what to do, you should have specific skills. By the time you graduate, we should have graduates who would specialize in some practical aspects like tiling, PoP, bricklaying, tailoring, motor mechanic.
“Apart from certificates, you have what has been coined in local parlance as sabi(ticate) and not only certificate. So let us change the narrative of this nation and allow the polytechnic to take the lead.
“Do you know that these phones that we have here are made by technological institutes abroad? Yes, you go to China. They are the ones doing these things. And that’s how they sustain themselves in a developed nation. A polytechnic should not look for subvention. We should be able to generate our own revenue ourselves and sustain ourselves. We don’t need to go to the government to get money. Not that every man will be sitting down here waiting. They are waiting for an alert and if it does not come, everybody will develop hypertension.
We should be able to generate the money here. That’s why we’re a technological institute. A technological institute is the new drive. And that is what ASUP, all stakeholders,, NBTE,, Co-Heads and even the students alumni associations are all preaching now that the narrative must change.
“The students know, some of them refuse university to come here. They know what they are looking for. What we need to do is to give them the training they need. Don’t think that all the students who are here is because they don’t get university admission. There are some of them who refuse university to come here. They know what they want, what we have, what we are going to
SOURCE:THE SUN