Director-General of the Industrial Training Fund, ITF, Dr Oluwatoyin Ogun, said President Bola Tinubu’s directive that 20 million artisans across the country be empowered has begun.
Ogun said the scheme, Skill Up Artisan, SUPAR, has started yielding positive results.
The ITF boss disclosed this in Akure, the Ondo State capital, while addressing artisans and chieftains of the All Progressives Congress, APC, led by the Convener of Ibigiga Ambassadors, Dr Alex Ajipe.
Ogun explained that the initiative was to ensure that artisans in the country can compete favourably with their counterpart across the world and provide a platform to make them millionaires.
According to him, “I have started pursuing it (the 20million artisans uplift). I am not just going to pursue, I have started. They can testify. The artisans can testify. That is why I call them my primary constituency.
“President Tinúbu has given us the mandate to lift five million artisans and we are prepared to do that. They can testify.
“There are jobs in Nigeria because if there not, how come people (artisans) from Ghana come here and get jobs easily? How come people from Benin Republic, Togo and all those places take our artisanal job and they are doing well. Some of them become millionaires, take our money back home.
“Why are they taking our jobs? Because the quality of our job has reduced, because quacks who do not really train well, break away from their masters and go form their own. We don’t want that to happen again, we want quality artisanal job.
“We want a plumber that will be a millionaire. We want artisans that can ride their own car and sponsor their children to any university of their choice in the world. We want an electrician that will be able to stand tall. We want dignity in artisanal jobs. We want Nigerian artisans to be like that of those in Japan. The artisans in Japan receive more money than professors in universities.”
National Coordinator of the Association Of Nigeria Artisans and Technicians, Adesina Akinyemi, said the body was carried along in the implementation of the scheme.
