For Temitope Aigbedion, a graduate of Nikky African Fashion Institute, government seems to be aware of the dangerous trend, as they have now made it mandatory for even undergraduates to take time out to acquire artisanal skills in between their study years.
It turned out that Temitope Aigbedion, who runs a modest fashion design shop in Oshodi area of Lagos is the only one of the four top artisans spoken to, that had apprentices. She actually has five of them at the moment, but that is not to say she hasn’t experienced the unsavoury trend.
“Of recent, around 2005, there is this decline in apprenticeship. They just don’t want to come in again; it seems parents prefer sending their wards to proper fashion schools, polytechnics or universities. The good thing, however, is they still have to come to proper fashion shops like ours to learn practicals and perfect whatever they had learnt in the fashion schools and tertiary institutions.
One other common trend, Aigbedion remarked, is that “Most of the apprentices don’t wait to graduate properly. Immediately they feel they’ve learnt what they perceive to be enough skills to make some money on their own, they just abscond. You know in the past, apprentices stayed back and served out their years, however competent they may have become. It was their way of paying their masters back. But that is not the case anymore. I have one of such as we speak. I taught her the rudiments of the work, and the moment she had acquired good enough skills, she just took off. The parents came to beg me, saying they would get back to me, but they never came. Interestingly, she has been working and making money. Sometimes, she even comes back to me for assistance and I offer it. Probably because of my Christian faith, I do not hold grudges for long. Besides, she is still my product and my pride.”
Even though she is lucky to have apprentices, Aigbedion, a graduate of Nikky Africana Fashion Institute, which was then affiliated to Yaba College of Technology, said more that 75 percent of her colleagues in the tailoring association she belongs to complain of this same problem of shortage of apprentices.
“Even my next door neighbour, a senior male tailor of tested quality, has no single apprentice.”
Asked why she thinks young people don’t want to learn anymore, Aigbedion smiled and said, “They are learning; I can tell you that for free. You know it is now mandatory for students in our higher institutions to acquire artisenal skills after their year two. You either go for tailoring, hairdressing, or go to learn barbing or computer-related skills. My two daughters in the university went through the process. This is to ensure that these skills do not die, and so that young people can have something to fall back on if they don’t immediately secure their choice jobs after school.”
She also attests to the menace of yahoo yahoo internet scam: “Most of my male colleagues who had male apprentices tell stories of how they all eventually leave to go into yahoo yahoo business, simply because they can’t wait out the duration of the apprenticeship. It is so bad that they even come and greet their masters in a ‘big way’ to show how successful they have become. They come with big cars and even offer to buy things for their bosses, literally saying, ‘we have made it, you are still on this your needle and thread job’.”
Aside Yahoo yahoo, what other reasons are responsible for apprentices quitting midway?
Aigbedion said: “When it comes to handiwork, it takes years; but this generation of youths don’t have that patience. They want to make it early and quickly. That’s the case with the one I spoke of earlier. The moment she felt she had acquired enough skills, her attitude changed and she started playing truancy, coming to work at her convenience. So I released her. I later found that even her mother was encouraging her, as most of her friends were giving her jobs, which she would first attend to before coming to resume with me.”
Aigbedion has trained about 50 apprentices since she started out fulltime in 1994, and says she never burdens her apprentices with huge severance requirements.