Founder and President of IMANI Africa, Franklin Cudjoe, is calling for the restoration of technical universities to polytechnics.
This follows what he terms as the technical universities’ failure to stick to their core mandate of churning out highly skilled technical professionals to feed the job market.
In September 2016, government rolled out a policy to convert all polytechnics in the country into technical universities, a move it said was to help reposition them as strategic institutions for training highly skilled human resources to drive the nation’s socio-economic development.
However, 10 years after the conversion, many believe the impact has not been positive, considering the fact that the technical skills these institutions used to offer are no longer there to help graduates create their own jobs, adding up to the number of unemployed youth on the market.
According to Mr Cudjoe, the polytechnics were purposely created to serve a specific function by providing highly skilled technical know-how to feed the job market, but have since their conversion, deviated from that mandate.
His concerns stem from the brouhaha surrounding the ongoing security recruitment where over 90 per cent of applicants won’t be enlisted due to limited slots.
Interior Minister Muntaka-Mubarak Mohammed says 500,000 people applied across all security agencies, with 105,000 qualifying after taking the aptitude tests. However, out of this number, there are only 5,000 slots available, meaning over 90,000 qualified applicants will still be dropped.
Reacting to the development, Mr. Cudjoe said the situation has gotten to this level as a result of unemployment in the country. He believes most of these applicants are only trying to secure employment, not because they have the passion to serve as security officers.
He says if the government had taken technical and vocational education seriously, the unemployment situation would have been better, reducing the huge numbers seeking entry into the security services.
In a post on his Facebook page on Thursday, March 12, 2026, Mr. Cudjoe said the problem must be fixed by reverting technical universities to polytechnics to focus on their core values.
Find below the full post shared on his Facebook:
Better not to sell these first applications. Perhaps let successfully scrutinised for the next critical steps pay a reasonable fee. 500,000 applications for slots less than 40,000 tells the scale of the unemployment and under employment in the country! We need to fix this. It is not healthy for a country when many of its young and healthy want to apply for public sector jobs apparently because they are safe jobs, and not necessarily productive.
It is sad that we turned our polytechnic institutions into tertiary level institutions without emphasising that they stay true to their middle level capability in churning out advanced vocational and technical skills critically needed for the country. Most if not all polytechnics attract more students interested in grammar and management studies than what they were originally meant for- middle level skilled manpower to build or power our industrial space. Sad! We must reverse this and l would go far to suggest that public education budgets should discriminate proportionally more towards technical and vocational education.
