Economics - Another Useless Degree in Nigeria

To those studying Economics hoping for a banking career, please understand that With the increasing sophistication of electronic banking, transfer services, ATM’s and POS machines, the need for bankers will fall and there will be a decline in recruitment in that area.

To be more concise, ECONOMICS is one of the growing number of useless courses if the curriculum is not quantitative based and focused on modeling outcomes and forecasting trends based on real time statistics and data. 

Here are the jobs available to Economics graduates overseas:

1. Economist 

2. Financial risk analyst

3. Data Analyst

4. Financial Planner

5. Accountant

6. Economic Researcher

7. Financial Consultant

8. Investment Analyst 

9. Actuary

10. teaching

11. Public sector

Based on this list, we can immediately eliminate 2,4,8,9, give some deferential award to 1,3,6 that in Nigeria all lead to 11 in policy roles, with the remaining extract from all defaulting to 10 or finally outside economics in the world of hustling.

It does not take much observation to understand that there are very few businesses, not government, that need Economists with such skill sets in Nigeria.

The tendency is to blame the government for the unavailability of jobs, but it is not the fault of government graduating complicit students, it is the failure of the business that have not evolved to use that sophisticated workforce at its disposal for profit.

It also indicative of the primitive or to be politically correct emergent nature of Nigeria’s economy that is cash based, off the grid, with few ways to capture that data and statistics in a sophisticated manner for an equally unsophisticated business and even government sector that cannot use it.

Economists, does not equip you to be an entrepreneur, it typically equips you to be employed by a large business or consultancy service that puts together research from partnerships with other specialists economists, and it takes great skill and access to scarce data to open a one man shop or better yet to have such unique information and experience to be consulted and paid in Nigeria. 

Presently, there are few large private consultancy firms that one could look to hire top talent or which are the dream destination of graduates of economics; rather it revolves around economists finding any financial related job. 

The bright side is that with the advent of technology like phones and merchant services, there is room for expansion in this sector especially in the insurance, actuary and business intelligence sector,  but progress is painful as the informal sector, where the bulk of the business would come from is mostly crude and run by natives operating on vernacular intelligence.

A few years of inactivity from being unable to work and manipulate data, ignorance of data sources and low skill in using analytic software can deaden any unpracticed equations learnt in school leaving you not that much different from many other fires of study less reliant on data but on using theory to tackle its professional pre-occupations.

stay away from the theoretical side, bone up on mathematics, have the professors deal on the application science aspect, and invest in keeping abreast of software tools, if your training lacks these elements 


STAY AWAY FROM ECONOMICS :)


By Terhemba Osuji

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Re-Indoctrination Before Restructuring

Whenever you talk about poor governance, Nigerians always mention restructuring as the catch all panacea to fix all problems and issues. But very few Nigerians really know what type of restructuring is needed or how to secure this much needed restructuring in practice.  Many believe restructuring is about returning to the regional government system predating 1966, and tagging on a few new regions, while others wish to retain the federalist state structure and others wish for tribal governments for each of Nigeria nearly 360 indigenous tribes.  Others talk about super imposing a true federalist structures over whatever system but to ensure regional control of resources, most of that agitation seems to be driven by the south east and south-south zones sitting on crude oil reserves, followed by a devolution of items on the exclusive list to those new federalist units.  Others see restructuring as repeal of the 1999 constitution in its entirety and fashioning a new constituti...
Read more

PRESIDENT BUHARI’S DESTINED TO FAIL PROVINCIAL ECONOMIC POLICIES

Where is Nigeria’s Minister of State, Kachikwu? Apparently, he has been sidelined in favor of Baru searching for crude in the lake chad Basin.  It is not enough that Nigeria has been structured on a ridiculously, uneconomic and wasteful system of drilling in the south and pipelining the crude all the way up to Kaduna for refinement.  Now Buhari has become fixated with finding oil in the north to complete his economic linkage plan after the planned completion of the dry inland port and a railway linking from there all the way to Chad and Cameroon for his Kanuri relative smugglers to prosper selling petrol and other banned items without paying Nigeria excise duties unlike the militarized border around Lagos with the republic of Benin. You can almost feel the gasping for air exasperation of Buhari as he is confronted with yet another failure to find crude and I can hear his iron willed response to keep on drilling to find oil at all costs so he and the north can be rid or done wi...
Read more