Mazi Etofolam Felix Osuji, mni, FCA, makes an important intervention in amplifying Professor Femi Mimiko’s defence of the humanities. I agree with a substantial part of the philosophical argument, but I believe Nigeria’s peculiar history, economic structure and present condition require us to take the discussion one difficult step further.
The choice before Nigeria is not STEM versus the humanities. That is a false choice.
History, philosophy, literature, political science, sociology and the arts remain essential to any civilised society. A nation capable of manufacturing microchips but incapable of understanding its history, managing diversity, interrogating power or developing ethical leadership can become technologically sophisticated while remaining socially dysfunctional.
Indeed, Nigeria itself provides ample evidence that technical qualifications alone do not manufacture good governance.
We have had engineers presiding over failed infrastructure, economists supervising economic crises, lawyers undermining the rule of law, accountants operating within corrupt financial systems and highly credentialled public officials presiding over spectacular institutional dysfunction.
Clearly, a certificate, whether in engineering or philosophy, is not synonymous with competence, character or nation building.
On that score, Professor Mimiko is right.
But there is another Nigerian reality that intellectual discussions about the purpose of universities must confront.
NIGERIA IS NOT STARTING FROM WHERE CHINA, BRITAIN OR AMERICA ARE TODAY
Nigeria is a vast country of well over 200 million people whose labour market is overwhelmingly informal.
Our streets and communities are populated by traders, subsistence and smallholder farmers, mechanics, welders, carpenters, electricians, bricklayers, plumbers, tailors, drivers, hairdressers, technicians and innumerable microentrepreneurs.
Official statistics put informal employment at well above 90% of total employment.
That reality must matter when designing education.
For decades, however, we constructed an educational prestige system in which practically every ambitious family wanted its child to obtain a university degree, while technical colleges, vocational education and apprenticeship became associated with those supposedly incapable of academic achievement.
That was a profound developmental mistake.
The problem therefore isn’t that Nigeria teaches too much history or philosophy.
The problem is that we have disproportionately educated generations for a formal, white collar economy that has never been large enough to absorb them.
We produced certificates faster than we produced industries.
We expanded universities faster than factories.
We graduated job seekers faster than entrepreneurs and skilled technicians.
And eventually we arrived at the absurdity of university graduates competing for work that never required university education in the first place.
OUR ANTECEDENTS MATTER
Before colonialism, African societies did not lack education.
They possessed systems of apprenticeship, agriculture, craftsmanship, metalworking, construction, commerce, medicine and community administration through which knowledge passed between generations.
Among the Igbo, apprenticeship remains one of the clearest surviving examples.
A young person learned a trade under an experienced practitioner, understood the market, acquired commercial discipline and, traditionally, could eventually be supported into independent enterprise.
It was education tied directly to productive life.
Colonial education introduced literacy and institutions that unquestionably brought benefits, but it was also substantially designed around the administrative, missionary and commercial requirements of the colonial order.
The clerk, interpreter, teacher and administrator became symbols of advancement.
Working with one’s hands gradually became socially inferior to working behind a desk.
Independence came.
The psychology largely remained.
That is part of the historical antecedent we must have the courage to interrogate.
THE LESSON FROM HISTORY IS NOT TO ABANDON HISTORY
The removal of History from Nigeria’s basic education curriculum was indeed a serious policy mistake, although the history is slightly more complicated than saying that Nigeria simply “abolished History.”
History lost its status as a standalone subject under curriculum restructuring and was substantially absorbed into Social Studies before government eventually began restoring it as a distinct subject.
That experience strengthens rather than weakens the case for careful educational reform.
We should never again confuse curriculum modernisation with cultural amnesia.
And the Mungo Park example is instructive for another reason.
For generations African children were commonly presented with formulations suggesting that European explorers “discovered” rivers, territories and geographical features already known, inhabited, named and used by Africans.
Modern historical teaching should teach children to interrogate precisely such language.
That is what good humanities education does.
It doesn’t merely tell children what happened.
It teaches them to ask who wrote the account, from whose perspective, using whose evidence and serving which historical assumptions?
We desperately need that intellectual capacity.
BUT WE ALSO NEED PEOPLE WHO CAN FIX THE AIR CONDITIONER
This is where philosophical debates about the university sometimes become disconnected from Nigerian reality.
A country can simultaneously need philosophers and plumbers.
Historians and welders.
Political scientists and machinists.
Sociologists and electricians.
Poets and programmers.
Lawyers and agricultural technicians.
The developmental mistake is believing that one category is inherently intellectually superior to the other.
Visit many Nigerian building sites and you discover that specialised technical work is frequently constrained by shortages of sufficiently trained craftsmen.
Look at our dependence on imported machinery and the difficulty of maintaining sophisticated equipment.
Look at agriculture still dominated by low productivity methods.
Look at the emerging requirements of solar energy, modern automotive diagnostics, mechatronics, refrigeration, industrial fabrication and digital systems.
Then look at the enormous population of young Nigerians searching desperately for livelihoods.
Connecting those two realities should be one of the principal objectives of education policy.
UNIVERSITY IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A JOB CENTRE, BUT NEITHER SHOULD IT BECOME A CERTIFICATE FACTORY
Professor Mimiko’s classical conception of the university as a place of intellectual liberation deserves protection.
Universities should cultivate curiosity.
They should conduct basic research whose commercial usefulness may not become apparent for decades.
They should produce historians, philosophers, linguists, mathematicians and theoretical scientists.
Not every academic inquiry requires an immediate invoice attached to it.
But there is an equally dangerous opposite extreme:
using the philosophical purity of university education to excuse chronic disconnection between education and society.
Nigeria is a developing country with limited public resources, mass underemployment, infrastructure deficits and enormous developmental requirements.
If taxpayers finance thousands of graduates annually from particular programmes while the economy has little capacity to absorb their skills, government and universities are entitled, indeed obligated, to ask whether enrolment proportions, course content and pathways require adjustment.
That is not anti intellectualism.
It is planning.
We must distinguish between saying:
“The humanities are useless”,
which I reject,
and saying:
“Nigeria needs far more technical, vocational, scientific and productive skills than our present educational structure has historically supplied.”
which I strongly support.
Those are completely different propositions.
CHINA DID NOT SIMPLY “DELETE THE HUMANITIES”
This also requires factual precision.
The widely circulated claim that China “deleted 12,000 degrees” is rhetorically powerful but somewhat misleading.
Chinese universities reportedly discontinued or suspended roughly 12,200 undergraduate programmes between 2021 and 2025 while introducing about 10,200 new programmes as part of a large curriculum restructuring.
Some humanities and language programmes were affected, but China did not abolish the humanities.
The more important lesson is China’s willingness to continually reorganise educational capacity around changing technological, demographic and economic priorities.
That is the lesson Nigeria should study, not blindly imitate every Chinese policy decision.
OUR SOLUTION SHOULD BEGIN MUCH EARLIER THAN UNIVERSITY
This is perhaps where I depart most significantly from the framing of the debate.
Nigeria’s skills revolution should not principally occur by converting universities into vocational colleges.
It should begin before university.
By the time a Nigerian child finishes secondary school, that young person should possess literacy, numeracy, digital competence, civic and historical knowledge, critical reasoning and at least one economically useful practical skill.
Technical colleges should become prestigious institutions.
Polytechnics should recover their original technological purpose.
Apprenticeship should be professionalised and certified.
Industry should participate in curriculum development.
Master craftsmen should be recognised as educators.
And qualifications should increasingly measure what someone can actually do, not merely how many years that person occupied a classroom.
University can then remain university.
But it will no longer carry the impossible burden of being regarded as the only respectable route to adulthood.
THE BALANCE NIGERIA ACTUALLY NEEDS
So Professor Mimiko’s caution is valuable.
Tim Akano’s provocation is equally valuable.
Perhaps the synthesis lies between them.
Do not kill the humanities.
But kill the prejudice against technical education.
Preserve History.
But teach our history critically and from perspectives that restore African agency.
Teach philosophy.
But also teach fabrication.
Teach literature.
But build laboratories.
Teach political science.
But establish modern technical colleges.
Produce PhDs.
But also produce master craftsmen whose qualifications command equivalent professional respect.
Above all, stop measuring educational success by the number of certificates issued.
The final measure must be the quality of the human being and the productive capacity that education releases into society.
Nigeria needs citizens capable of asking why.
We equally need citizens who know how.
The humanities can help us understand what kind of society we should build.
Science and technology can help us discover what is possible to build.
Technical and vocational competence provides millions of citizens with the practical ability to actually build it.
And history reminds us why we are building it in the first place.
For a country in Nigeria’s present circumstances, none of these is expendable.
The reform we require therefore isn’t the replacement of humanities with technology. It is the replacement of an educational hierarchy inherited from another era with an ecosystem built around Nigeria’s actual human, cultural and economic needs.
We should stop producing graduates merely because universities can accommodate them.
We should educate Nigerians because society requires their knowledge, and train Nigerians because the economy requires their skills.
Nigeria needs the philosopher.
Nigeria needs the engineer.
Nigeria desperately needs the technician.
And above all, Nigeria needs an educational system intelligent enough to understand the difference, and wise enough to value all three.
Duruebube Chimazuru Nnadi-Oforgu
For
OBLONG MEDIA GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE
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