Capacity development is indispensable for enhanced productivity for efficiency and effectiveness of workers and ultimate development of society. You can imagine the ineptitude and ineffectiveness that will characterise production services without intentional, periodic manpower training. Using untrained workers for production processes is akin to using a blunt knife to fell a tree. The consequences are better imagined than experienced. The worker will be exhausted, unable to perform the work creditably, the work delivery will be longer than necessary ( if delivered at all). Compliance to specification and timeline is a mirage. And such situations will translate to counter-productivity. Developed economies are driven by efficient and effective manpower. There is no amount of resources channelled into capacity building that is a waste. In fact, building the capacity of workers is a necessary investment that will yield short-term and long-term dividends. Employers, who have discovered the value of manpower development stop at nothing, leave no stone unturned in ensuring that their employees are trained.
Priority should be given to training of workers. No employer of labour should hope to get maximum and optimal productivity without training, and retraining of its workforce. Manpower, not capital remains the most critical factor of production. It is manpower that determines the capital base, sustainability, and durability of any corporate organisation. It is the trained and well motivated manpower that drives realisation of corporate goals. When a worker is trained, the organisation has life. And its existence is guaranteed. A trained worker is the oxygen and lifeline of any organisation. When manpower or workers are neglected, demotivated and untrained, then the organisation will inevitably totter on the brink of bankruptcy and consequent extinction, its asset base notwithstanding. Lao Russell, the Russian philosopher and educationist once wrote, “In vain you build the city if you don’t first build the man”. This aphorism is a stark truth and incontestable. most unfortunately, many employers of Labour place value on profit making while treating the training of workers with levity.
The output of a worker is the direct natural result of who he or she really is. No person gives what he or she does not have. The effeciency or inefficiency of a worker comes to bare on the work he or she does. Manpower training or capacity building is the bedrock for fulfilled dreams, vision and yearning. Periodic training, including pre-engagement orientation reduces job or occupation related hazards. It reduces ignorance-induced manhour losses and avoidable deaths. An accident that leads to death in companies that prioritise safety, grounds the wheel of industry and throws the work environment into an unpleasant euphoria. Multinational companies and other private businesses run on core management principles are irrevocably committed to the training of workers because they believe that the manpower is the engine of the company. When the engine malfunctions and eventually packs up, then all hope is lost. With a trained workforce any business can rise from obscurity to stardom, from grass to grace and bankruptcy to affluence.
However, permit me to say without fear of contradiction that manpower training seems alien to the public sector. Employment into the public sector is mostly based on paper qualifications without recourse to capacity to deliver on assigned responsibility. Learning on the job, which is conversely, a capacity building manpower development mechanism, or skill transfer is one way to generate knowledge and experience informally and deploy into the job for positive results. Since most public schools are theory based, leaving graduands with no requisite practical knowledge on the job, training and retraining remain the veritable measure to mitigate the consequent lacuna and deficiencies. I discover that God created humans with potentials most of which are latent and innate, only training and retraining will develop and fan them to flames. Therefore, the public sector should place value on workers’ training, so the best of the workers can be extracted and brought to bare on the work they do. I wish to reiterate that productivity is proportional to capacity.
I hope public sector, especially government establishment will place value on manpower training and retraining so workers can compete favourably with their private sector counterparts and rake in the revenue and profits that government needs. Government should also commit to capacity building by awarding scholarship to deserving students to study courses in higher institutions within and outside the shores of Nigeria, to address the manpower needs of the States and Nigeria. The administration of former Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State deserves commendation in this regard. The future depends on how much we invest in manpower or human capital development and not necessarily material infrastructure, like roads and bridges

By:  Igbiki Benibo