A REPORT ON

STUDENTS INDUSTRIAL WORK EXPERIENCE SCHEME

(SIWES)
TRAINING PROGRAMME
(March 2022 – August 2022)
OLADIPUPO ADENIYI
(18CM024425)
AT

NIGERIAN RAILWAY CORPORATION

SUBMITTED TO
THE DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
COVENANT UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT FOR THE AWARD OF THE
DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ENGINEERING (B.ENG.),
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING,
COVENANT UNIVERSITY, OTA, OGUN STATE, NIGERIA
AUGUST 2022.
 DEDICATION
I dedicate this report to the Lord God Almighty, who gave me the strength,
wisdom, understanding, and good health that kept me throughout my Industrial
Training. I also dedicate this report to my parents, siblings, Supervisors, and
friends who supported me during the said period. I am grateful to you all.

APPRICIATION
My immense gratitude goes to God for His love, good health, and protection
throughout the internship.
I also want to use this medium to thank my parents for their care and financial
support during this period.
I am very grateful to all employees of NIGERIAN RAILWAY CORPORATION
for your humility and willingness to teach and help me understand everything
relating to my training with the company. I am thankful to all my direct supervisors
for your words of encouragement and for always being available to dispense
knowledge. I learned a lot from all of you.
 ABSTRACT
The entire purpose of my SIWES report is to provide a full account of the training
I got while interning with NIGERIAN RAILWAY CORPORATION. I worked at
the company for six months. It includes images from previous firm initiatives as
well as photographs taken during the training. I highlighted the
practical applications of the knowledge I gained from this company and the
challenges faced.
The report also features pictures of the company's past projects and the various activities that I
participated in during the training. It also provides a comprehensive analysis of the various
lessons that I learned from the company. It also aims to help the organizers of SIWES and the
school make the training more effective.
TABLE OF CONTENT
CHAPTER ONE 1.1 HISTORY OF SIWES
The Student Industrial Work Experience Scheme (SIWES) was established by ITF (Industrial
Training Funds) in the year 1973 to solve the problem of lack of adequate proper skills for
employment of tertiary institution graduates by Nigerian Industries. The Students’ Industrial
Work Experience Scheme (SIWES) was founded to be a skill training program to help expose
and prepare students of universities, polytechnics and colleges of education for the industrial
work situation to be met after graduation. This scheme serves as a smooth transition from the
classroom to the world of work and further helps in the application of knowledge. The scheme
provides students with the opportunity of acquainting and exposing themselves to the
experience required in handling and managing of equipment and machinery that are usually
not made available in their institutions. Before this scheme was established, there was a
growing concern and trend noticed by industrialists that graduates of higher institutions lacked
sufficient practical background for employment. It used to be that students who got into
Nigerian institutions to study science and technology were not trained in the practical know-
how of their various fields of study. As a result, they could not easily find jobs due to the lack of
working experience. Therefore, the employers thought that theoretical education going on in
higher institutions was not responsive to the needs of the employers of labor. This was a huge
problem for thousands of Nigerians until 1973. It is against this background that the
fundamental reason for initiating and designing the scheme by the fund in 1973/74 was
introduced. The ITF organization (Industrial Training Fund) made a decision to help all
interested Nigerian students and established the SIWES program. It was officially approved and
presented by the Federal Government in 1974. 7 The scheme was solely funded by the ITF
during its formative years but as the financial involvement became unbearable to the fund in
1979, the federal government handed over the management of the scheme to both the
National Universities Commission (NUC) and the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE).
Later, in November 1984, the federal government reverted the management and
implementation of the scheme to ITF. In July 1985, it was taken over by the Industrial Training
Fund (ITF) while the funding was solely borne by the federal government. (Culled from Job
Specifications on Students Industrial Work Experience Scheme).

The SIWES has the following objectives.

• Preparing students for their likely work environment after graduation.
• Make the transition from the school to work environment smooth and easy
• It helps the students establish contacts for future job placements.
• Bridging the gap between theory and practice by enabling students with an opportunity to
apply knowledge gained in school
• It strengthens the involvement of employers in the entire educational process Indicating your
interest to work in any organization requires you to write an application letter, resumé or
Curriculum Vitae (CV), as needed, and other vital 11 documents.
In the case of Industrial Training, the essential document is the SIWES letter. This letter is an
official document from the university stating that you have been deployed to seek employment
in any reputable organization for industrial training and internship.
Before submitting my SIWES letter to Nigerian Railway Corporation, I visited the
Manpower department stating my interest in working with the organization. I was
interviewed on March 18th, 2022. After the discussions, they requested my student
ID and SIWES letter. I got accepted into the company, and I started working there on
March 21st ,2022. The entire process was seamless.
INFORMATION ON THE COMPANY OF ENGAGEMENT

The construction, development, and the management of the Nigerian Railway (NR), which was
started in 1895, constituted one of the cornerstones of British imperialism in Africa and in
colonial Nigeria’s political economy. Starting from that time and well into the postcolonial
period, the NR was the largest employer of labor in the colony; and by the mid-1970s it had
more than 30,000 staff. But for the construction and development of the NR system, it would
have been virtually impossible to bring together the many and different ethnic groups that now
constitute Nigeria. Thus, the story of the NR is also that of Nigeria; without one the other would
not have been possible. In view of these crucial roles of the NR in the development of Nigeria
and the expansion of the British Empire, there is a considerable volume of historical literature
on its pre-war and post-war periods. Completely missing from this literature, however, is the
analysis of the background to the transformation of the NR into a public corporation. There is,
therefore, a gap in the existing literature on the NR and Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC).
This present study therefore seeks to fill this gap. First, it is appropriate to review the extant
literature on the NR and NRC to contextualize the study. To date, the two most prolific
historians of the NR and NRC are Olasiji Oshin and Wale Oyemakinde. Whereas Oshin has
focused primarily on the political history of the railway institution, Oyemakinde has
concentrated on its labor history. Other prominent historians of the organization include
Tekena Tamuno, Olufemi Omosini, John M. Carland, Lisa Lindsay, and Francis Jaekel. The first
set of historical narratives on the NR was undertaken by the organization’s officials. The first
historical analysis was published in 1951 and was by J. Stocker, an official in the NR’s publicity
department. It was an overview of the development, achievements, and failures of the
organization in its first fifty years of existence. The next was also by the NR 9 itself and was
published in 1960, the year of Nigeria’s independence. It was also a general overview of the
historical development of the NR and its major milestones. The first broad and academic study
of the NR, however, is the two-part article by Tekena Tamuno, who traced the “genesis” of the
NR and identified the major epochs in its development from the late nineteenth century to the
1960s. Tamuno’s analysis, though academic, was in line with the official accounts of the NR; and
even those by Omosini, Carland, and Jaekel. Nevertheless, Omosini disagrees with Tamuno’s
analysis that had traced the origins of railway developments in Nigeria to the time between
1889 and 1890. To Omosini, the origins of railway developments in West Africa should start
from the 1870s, when many interest groups in West Africa and Britain began to lobby the
imperial government to grant them investment and loan guarantee, and approval to construct
railway lines in the British West African colonies. Also writing on the political history of the NR,
Carland, discusses the crucial role played by the officials of the Colonial Office in London,
particularly that of the Secretary of State for Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, in formulating and
implementing policies and programs for the NR; and factors – financial and bureaucratic – that
facilitated or constrained the construction and development of the first railway lines in Nigeria.
In later studies, Oshin and Jaekel extended the discourse on the political history of the NR much
further. Whereas Oshin’s studies on the planning, development, and the management of the
NR focus on the period 1880 to the early 1950s, Jaekel’s is a comprehensive survey of the first
one hundred years of the institution; from 1899 to 1999. Jaekel’s three-volume book is a
disjointed discussion by a former colonial railway employee reminiscing on the “good old days”
of colonial and postcolonial railway development and management in Nigeria. In contrast to the
studies on the political history of the NR are those on its social and labor history, including
those by Oyemakinde, Freund, and Lindsay. Oyemakinde focuses primarily on the many related
aspects of 10 the history of indigenous labor throughout the NR system, from 1895 to the late
1945. He argues that the recruitment and management of indigenous Nigerian laborers were
very crucial to the development of the NR; and that due to their discipline, skills, experience,
organizational ability, and location in the economy, they were able to mobilize themselves and
other workers in other sectors of the economy, to challenge the colonial authorities on many
labor issues. On the other hand, Freund analyses the related issue of labor migration from the
railway construction projects in Northern Nigeria into the tin mines of the Plateau area of Jos.
Lindsay has complemented the works of other labor historians by specifically studying “the
varying and contested masculinity and domesticity…within workers’ communities [and]
between family life and industrial relations” in the south-western part of Nigeria. As can be
detected from the literature reviewed above, none of them has discussed the background to
and the formation of the Nigerian Railway Corporation, a very critical development, which since
1955 has come to define the character, nature, and trajectory of post-war railway industry in
Nigeria. This article argues that the main reasons for the conversion of the NR into a public
statutory corporation was for the self-serving economic benefits of British imperialism and
Western merchant capital in Nigeria, to enable British merchants have some control and
influence over the management of the NR in the postcolonial period, and to ensure that the
colonial government would be far removed from direct negotiations with the stubborn post-
war railway workers. The paper is divided into the following parts: development of the NR from
the late nineteenth century to 1945; examination of the role of the NR in the management of
Nigerian ports up to the early 1950s; identification and critical examination of the various
interest groups ranged against the NR vis-à-vis its management of the ports and the factors
responsible for the removal of them from the NR’s control; and the, discussion of the important
11 role played by European merchant capital, railway workers, British colonial and imperial
officials, and Nigerian politicians in the creation of the (NRC).

The Nigerian Railway Corporation follows its set of experiences to the year 1898, when the
principal railroad in Nigeria was developed by the British colonial administration. On October 3,
1912, the Lagos Government Railway and the Baro-Kano Railway merged to become the
Government Department of Railways, which began statewide rail operations. The Nigerian
Railway Corporation Act of 1955 gave the corporation its current name and gave it the exclusive
legal right to build and operate rail services in Nigeria. The NRC went into a protracted period of
deterioration, inadequate administration, and eventually a complete absence of rail and
locomotive asset maintenance shortly after that. NRC declared bankruptcy in 1988, and all train
travel was suspended for six months. Trains resumed after that, where the tracks were still
operational. Passenger service was once again terminated in 2002. [3] With foreign support,
work to repair the rail lines and add new locomotives began in 2006. On the Lagos-Kano route,
regular, scheduled passenger service was restored in December 2012.

In the first half of 2021, the Nigerian Railway Corporation generated record revenues of 2.12
billion naira (about €4.664 million), an increase of 31% over the same timeframe in 2019, when
the previous record revenue was recorded. At the same time, freight transport revenue was
down, with increases primarily coming from passenger transit on the new standard gauge
between Lagos and Ibadan.

Mission

“To emerge as the leader in the Nigerian transport system, using well motivated work force
with modern technology;’’ 

Vision
“To be a world class rail transport organization, providing safe, efficient, affordable, reliable
and widely linked network and customer-oriented services.”
POLICY FOR UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE INTERNS

Nigerian Railway Corporation reliably endeavors to attract and retain young talent
from around the world's higher education institutions. Every undergraduate or
graduate intern who joins the company is given a training program that covers the
amount of months the intern will be there. Each undergraduate intern will be
rotated around the company's various departments. Graduate interns are placed in
departments that are closely connected to their field of study. For me, my rotation
was through eight engineering departments, where I spent at least two weeks in
each.

SUBMISSION OF IMPORTANT DOCUMENTS

At the beginning of my internship at Nigerian Railway Corporation, I submitted two vital
documents to indicate my commencement. One of the documents was sent to the SIWES office
of covenant university. The other was submitted to ITF (Industrial Training Fund) office at
Iponri, which is the closest to my workplace. These documents are.
1. SIWES acceptance letter.
2. SCAF (Students Commencement of Attachment Form)
SIWES ACCEPTANCE LETTER: The company wrote a letter stating that I had been accepted to
work with them for six months. This letter was later forwarded to the SIWES office of the
university. SCAF (STUDENTS' COMMENCEMENT OF ATTACHMENT FORM). This form is
submitted to the Industrial Training Fund (ITF) office closest to the place of work. It contains
information regarding the student, their institution, and their place of work.