An Oblong Media Global Intelligence Commentary Complementing Tim Akano’s “China Deleted 12,000 Degrees. Africa Is Still Awarding Them”
By Oblong Media Global Intelligence
Tim Akano’s compelling intervention on Africa’s curriculum crisis raises a question Nigeria can no longer afford to evade:
What exactly are we educating our children to become?
Nigeria is a country of well over 200 million people, overwhelmingly sustained not by large corporations and salaried white collar employment, but by an enormous informal economy of traders, artisans, technicians, transporters, mechanics, builders, farmers, fabricators, caterers, hairdressers, electricians, plumbers, welders and millions of other self employed people.
Official labour data reinforces the point: roughly 93% of Nigerian employment is informal.
Yet our educational psychology continues to behave as though the ultimate objective of education is to produce another generation of graduates carrying certificates from one government office to another looking for salaried employment.
There is something fundamentally wrong with that equation.
Nigeria does not necessarily have too many educated people.
Nigeria has too many people educated for an economy that scarcely exists.
That distinction is fundamental.
THE COLONIAL CLASSROOM OUTLIVED COLONIALISM
British colonial education in Nigeria was not originally constructed to turn millions of Africans into industrialists, inventors, manufacturers and technological entrepreneurs.
Its early priorities reflected the administrative needs of the colonial system: literacy, clerical competence, teaching, interpretation, record keeping and the production of personnel capable of serving government, missionary and commercial institutions.
Nigeria became independent in 1960.
But elements of that educational psychology survived independence.
The prestige hierarchy remained remarkably resilient.
The university graduate became socially superior to the technician.
The bachelor’s degree became more prestigious than an apprenticeship.
The office became more respectable than the workshop.
Parents celebrated the child studying law, political science or business administration while sometimes treating the child who wanted to become an electrician, machinist, carpenter or automotive technician as academically unsuccessful.
And so we created one of the great contradictions of modern Nigeria:
A country desperately short of world class skilled labour while simultaneously producing graduates who cannot find productive employment.
That is not merely unemployment.
It is a structural mismatch between education and economic reality.
CHINA UNDERSTOOD SOMETHING WE HAVE BEEN SLOW TO UNDERSTAND
Akano’s China comparison is particularly instructive.
Between 2021 and 2025, Chinese universities reportedly cut or suspended about 12,200 undergraduate programmes and introduced approximately 10,200 new ones, meaning more than 30% of university programmes experienced adjustment.
That does not mean China simply abolished the humanities. Nor should Nigeria.
It means China has demonstrated a willingness to ask a brutally practical question:
Does what we are teaching correspond with where our economy and technology are going?
That question should be permanently engraved above the entrance of Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Education.
A curriculum is not scripture.
If an educational programme repeatedly produces skills for which society has insufficient demand, government must have the courage to restructure it.
China is preparing engineers for artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced manufacturing, new materials, semiconductors and automation.
Nigeria should certainly participate in those industries.
But Nigeria must simultaneously recognise its own developmental starting point.
Before dreaming exclusively about semiconductor fabrication plants and humanoid robots, we also need millions of exceptionally competent electricians, plumbers, bricklayers, tilers, welders, machinists, refrigeration technicians, agricultural technicians, automotive engineers, solar installers and construction specialists.
There is nothing intellectually inferior about any of these professions.
IMAGINE A DIFFERENT NIGERIAN SECONDARY SCHOOL
Suppose that from junior secondary school, every Nigerian child received strong foundations in English, mathematics, science, history, civic education, digital literacy and critical thinking.
Then alongside those subjects, every student was required to acquire at least one serious productive skill.
Not the tokenistic vocational subjects we occasionally insert into curricula simply to satisfy policy documents.
I mean actual competence.
A student interested in construction could learn masonry, plumbing, electrical installation, tiling, roofing, surveying fundamentals and computer aided design.
Another could learn automotive diagnostics, mechatronics and electric vehicle maintenance.
Another could study welding, machining, CNC operation and fabrication.
Another could specialise in solar installation, batteries, inverters and renewable energy systems.
Another could learn refrigeration and air conditioning.
Another could study commercial agriculture, irrigation, greenhouse technology, aquaculture, animal husbandry, food processing and agricultural machinery.
Others could enter software development, networking, cybersecurity, robotics, electronics or industrial automation.
Fashion students should understand industrial garment production.
Carpenters should graduate into furniture manufacturing and computer aided woodworking.
Caterers should understand food processing, packaging, preservation and commercial kitchen management.
The objective should be straightforward:
NO NIGERIAN CHILD SHOULD COMPLETE SECONDARY EDUCATION WITHOUT KNOWING HOW TO DO SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY IS WILLING TO PAY FOR.
That single principle could transform the Nigerian economy within a generation.
TURN OUR ARTISANS INTO MASTER CRAFTSMEN
Nigeria already possesses an enormous indigenous skills training infrastructure.
It is called apprenticeship.
The roadside mechanic teaching four apprentices is running a vocational school.
The master carpenter training young people is running one.
The electrician taking apprentices to construction sites is providing technical education.
The Igbo apprenticeship system is, in its own way, an indigenous business school combining skills acquisition, mentorship, enterprise and eventual independence.
Instead of despising these systems because they do not resemble universities, government should professionalise them.
Create national competency standards.
Certify master craftsmen.
Accredit qualified workshops as training centres.
Introduce examinations based primarily on practical ability.
Allow an experienced but informally trained electrician to demonstrate competence and receive a nationally recognised qualification.
Nigeria’s existing National Skills Qualifications Framework already provides an institutional foundation for recognising competencies acquired in classrooms, workplaces and informal settings. The challenge is to take that principle to national scale.
Imagine millions of today’s informal artisans progressing from:
Apprentice – Certified Technician – Master Technician – Instructor – Entrepreneur.
Suddenly the mechanic is no longer merely a “roadside mechanic.”
He becomes a certified automotive diagnostic technician capable of maintaining modern vehicles.
The village carpenter becomes a furniture technologist.
The welder becomes a coded industrial welder.
The subsistence farmer becomes an agricultural entrepreneur.
The electrician becomes a renewable energy technician.
That is how you increase productivity without destroying the informal economy that currently feeds millions of families.
THE POLYTECHNIC MUST RECOVER ITS PURPOSE
We must also confront another Nigerian absurdity.
Why should a country desperately needing technical competence allow its polytechnics and technical colleges to become culturally subordinate to universities?
A Higher National Diploma should not be treated as the consolation prize of somebody who failed to enter university.
Our best technical institutions should contain sophisticated workshops, fabrication laboratories, automotive diagnostic centres, industrial machinery, robotics facilities and functioning partnerships with manufacturers.
Their students should spend substantial periods inside real businesses and factories.
Germany’s industrial strength was not built exclusively by university professors.
Neither was China’s.
An economy requires scientists and philosophers, but it also requires people capable of making, installing, maintaining and repairing things.
Nigeria desperately needs all four.
THIS IS NOT AN ARGUMENT FOR KILLING THE HUMANITIES
Here I would add an important qualification to Akano’s provocative argument.
Nigeria should not replace one educational extremism with another.
History matters.
Literature matters.
Philosophy matters.
Political science matters.
Languages matter.
The arts matter.
A technologically sophisticated society without history, ethics, communication, imagination and cultural consciousness can become extraordinarily capable without necessarily becoming wise.
The problem is not that Nigeria teaches humanities.
The problem is the imbalance between what our educational system produces and what our economy can productively absorb.
The solution therefore is not to abolish humanities.
It is to end the assumption that virtually everybody needs a conventional academic university degree.
Some people should become historians.
Some lawyers.
Some philosophers.
Some doctors.
Some engineers.
Some programmers.
And millions should become extraordinarily competent technicians, craftsmen, agricultural specialists and entrepreneurs.
Technical education must cease being regarded as education for children who supposedly could not cope academically.
It should become a prestigious alternative pathway.
FROM SUBSISTENCE FARMING TO AGRICULTURAL ENGINEERING
Perhaps nowhere is this transformation more urgent than agriculture.
A nation blessed with enormous arable potential should not have millions of citizens trapped indefinitely in subsistence agriculture.
Agricultural education should move beyond teaching students how crops grow.
Teach them irrigation.
Mechanisation.
Soil testing.
Drone-assisted crop monitoring.
Greenhouse farming.
Cold chain management.
Food preservation.
Packaging.
Aquaculture.
Animal genetics.
Agricultural accounting.
Commodity trading.
Processing and export standards.
The objective should not simply be to produce more farmers.
It should be to transform farmers into agricultural businesses and agriculture into industry.
THE WORLD WILL PAY FOR SKILL
There is another enormous opportunity.
Britain, Europe, Canada, Australia and other developed economies periodically experience shortages in particular skilled trades and technical occupations.
Nigeria’s response should not merely be to watch nurses, doctors and university graduates emigrate.
We can deliberately train internationally certified welders, electricians, healthcare technicians, machinists, construction specialists and other skilled professionals capable of competing globally where legitimate labour demand exists.
Skills can become an export industry.
A Nigerian technical qualification should eventually mean something in Lagos, London, Dubai, Toronto or Berlin because the competence behind the certificate is demonstrable.
And those who remain home become the workforce required for Nigerian industrialisation.
Either way, Nigeria wins.
CREDIT MUST FOLLOW SKILL
Training someone and then abandoning him with a certificate merely creates another category of frustrated graduate.
Technical reform must therefore connect education, certification, equipment, credit and markets.
A young Nigerian who completes certified training in welding should have pathways to equipment financing.
A trained farmer should have access to land, inputs and agricultural credit.
A certified carpenter should be able to finance industrial woodworking machinery.
A solar technician should have pathways into renewable energy companies or entrepreneurship.
A fashion graduate should have access to industrial sewing equipment rather than graduating with nothing but theoretical knowledge.
Education must terminate in productive capacity, not graduation photography.
NIGERIA HAS STARTED, BUT MUST GO MUCH FURTHER
It is important to acknowledge that the Federal Government has begun moving in this direction.
Nigeria’s current TVET initiative provides tuition, free vocational training, stipends and start, up support in selected trades, while the Federal Government has also revised curricula and publicly committed itself to stronger skills, based education.
The Nigerian government’s Education Sector Renewal Initiative reports more than 1.3 million TVET applications, over 1,700 accredited centres and more than 30 NBTE trades, demonstrating the enormous appetite for practical skills.
That is encouraging.
But this cannot remain another federal programme sitting beside the conventional educational system.
Skills education must become part of the spine of the educational system itself.
The ambition should be measured in tens of millions, not thousands.
Every local government should eventually possess modern technical and vocational training capacity linked to its local economy.
Oil producing areas should have petroleum, welding, instrumentation and marine technical skills.
Agricultural belts should emphasise mechanisation and agro processing.
Commercial centres should teach logistics, accounting, digital commerce and entrepreneurship.
Industrial clusters should shape curricula around manufacturing.
Education should respond to geography, resources and economic opportunity.
STOP EDUCATING EVERYBODY FOR AN AIR CONDITIONED OFFICE
For generations we have unconsciously communicated a destructive message to Nigerian children:
Study hard so that you will never have to work with your hands.
That philosophy must end.
The countries whose automobiles we admire, whose machines we import, whose elevators we install, whose medical equipment fills our hospitals and whose electronics occupy our homes did not become wealthy by despising people who build things.
Someone designed them.
Someone fabricated them.
Someone assembled them.
Someone installed them.
Someone maintains them.
And all five are participants in the knowledge economy.
The dignity of labour must return to Nigerian education.
THE NEW NATIONAL OBJECTIVE
Nigeria’s education system should ultimately pursue a simple national covenant:
Every child literate.
Every child numerate.
Every child digitally competent.
Every child capable of critical thought.
Every child exposed to entrepreneurship.
And every school leaver equipped with at least one economically useful skill.
University should then become one of several prestigious destinations rather than the only socially respectable destination.
We should build universities.
But we should also build technical colleges that resemble factories.
Workshops that resemble workplaces.
Agricultural institutes that operate farms.
Engineering schools where students manufacture things.
Polytechnics where patents, prototypes and companies emerge alongside diplomas.
And apprenticeship systems where experience can become recognised professional qualification.
Nigeria’s greatest natural resource is neither oil nor gas.
It is approximately two hundred million human beings whose productive capacity remains enormously underdeveloped.
The tragedy is not that the Nigerian artisan works with his hands.
The tragedy is that we have failed to combine those hands with modern technology, professional certification, capital and industrial organisation.
Tim Akano is therefore correct to provoke this national conversation.
But Nigeria’s curriculum revolution must extend beyond deleting obsolete university courses.
We need something much larger:
A NATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EDUCATION AND WORK.
Our schools must stop preparing millions of young Nigerians principally to search for jobs that do not exist.
They must begin preparing Nigerians to build houses, manufacture products, mechanise farms, repair machines, write software, install energy systems, fabricate components, create businesses and ultimately create the jobs themselves.
China aligned education with national ambition.
Germany dignified technical craftsmanship.
Japan combined technological modernity with extraordinary manufacturing discipline.
Nigeria must develop its own model, suited to the peculiar realities of a vast, youthful, entrepreneurial and overwhelmingly informal economy.
We must stop asking every Nigerian child: “What degree will you study?”
The more important question is:
“WHAT WILL YOU KNOW HOW TO DO?”
Because ultimately, certificates decorate walls.
Skills build nations.
Complementary commentary to Tim Akano’s “China Deleted 12,000 Degrees. Africa Is Still Awarding Them.”
By Duruebube Chimazuru Nnadi-Oforgu
For
OBLONG MEDIA GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE
Leave a Reply