NEWS: Nigeria Has Only 7 Occupational Therapists’From
Ayo Adebayo
There are only seven Occupational Therapists and 40 technicians serving Nigeria’s 140 million people.
Executive Secretary of the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), Dr. Nuru Yakubu, who disclosed this during an interaction with newsmen in Abuja said the field was one of the new areas in which the Board had developed curricula to train more professionals.
Occupational Therapists (OTs) help people who have conditions that are mentally, physically, developmentally, or emotionally disabling improve their ability to perform tasks in their daily living and working environments. They also help them develop, recover, or maintain daily living and work skills.
Yakubu said the board since inception, had developed 180 curricula, with 50 more being developed. Several of these, have been reviewed, some of them for the first time, to make them more learner-centred, with more focus on ICT and practicals.
For examination, the Secretarial Studies programme of old, being offered by polytechnics, is now known as Office Technology Management, with 70 per cent of it being practice-based, and infused with Entrepreneurship and ICT.
The NBTE Scribe said a former Surveyor-General of the federation once confided in him that Nigeria’s loss of the Bakassi Peninsula might not have been unconnected to its use of obsolete surveying equipment, while its neighbour, Cameroon had for long employed the use of modern digital, equipment.
NBTE has therefore taken it upon itself to equip its institutions with relevant equipment, such that three federal polytechnics and the School of Surveying, Oyo, now have state-of-the-art surveying equipment.
In addition to these, Yakubu said the Board had developed a total of 246 e-Books for the use of students in institutions under its supervision. The books, which will soon be launched by the Minister of Education, Dr. Sam Egwu, were based on the revised curricula and will be distributed directly to students through their union.
“Student unionism should move from mere activism to the provision of learning materials for students”, he said.