The plum arising from Nigeria’s large oil-cash receipts has informed a neglect of Agriculture, Skill/Innovation and Entrepreneurship which would evolve an industrial state with the capacity to absorb her teeming youth population. Worse still, the country’s education system is tailored along lines that produce graduates lacking requisite mental infrastructure and experience and therefore making them misfits in the economy. The paper explores ways of curbing Nigeria’s unemployment dilemma, emphasizing the educationist point of view; we specifically investigated the proximate causes of graduate unemployment in Nigeria using Cross River State as our case study. Random sampling procedures are adopted to survey six Local Government Areas across the three senatorial districts in the state. Results reveal an inverse relationship between skill acquisition/innovation, entrepreneurship, economic diversification and unemployment. It is recommended that public policy should emphasize technical/vocational education leading to self-reliance and self-employment, innovation and entrepreneurship, while effort should be made to reduce corruption and institutional bottlenecks at all levels of government.
Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Self-reliance, Technical Education, Unemployment
