*A strange thing is happening in Nigeria*
A young man spends 20 years climbing the educational ladder.
6 years in primary school.
6 years in secondary school.
4 to 6 years in university.
1 year of NYSC.
By the time he is done, he has invested roughly 6,500 to 7,000 days preparing for life.
Then life arrives and asks a simple question:
“What problem can you solve?”
Silence.
Not because he is unintelligent.
Not because he is lazy.
But because somewhere along the journey, we confused education with certification.
We taught people how to pass exams, not how to create value.
Think about it.
An electrician who never attended university can walk into a building worth N500 million and confidently power every room from the foundation to the penthouse.
A graduate with multiple certificates may stand beside him unable to identify which wire powers the building.
One has credentials.
The other has capability.
The market pays for capability.
That is why reality often delivers a rude mathematical lesson.
If a graduate earns N100,000 monthly, that is N1.2 million annually.
A skilled technician charging N40,000 per job and handling just two jobs weekly earns over N4 million yearly.
Same country.
Different skills.
Different outcomes.
The tragedy is not that one earns more than the other.
The tragedy is that we keep preparing millions of young people for a race that no longer exists.
We celebrate admission lists like victory trophies.
We celebrate graduation photos like guaranteed employment letters.
Then we act surprised when hundreds of applicants compete for one vacancy.
Imagine 1,000 people chasing 10 jobs.
Basic mathematics says 990 people will be disappointed.
No motivational speaker can negotiate with arithmetic.
Yet we continue producing graduates faster than we produce opportunities.
That is like manufacturing keys without building doors.
The painful irony?
The people we once looked down on are increasingly becoming the people we depend on.
When your transformer fails at midnight, you do not call a philosophy graduate.
When your water stops running, you do not search for a political scientist.
When your air conditioner breaks in April heat, theory suddenly becomes less important than technical competence.
The economy has a brutal honesty.
It rewards usefulness more than status.
Nations that understood this long ago built prosperity differently.
They stopped asking only, “How many graduates do we have?”
They started asking, “How many builders, technicians, machinists, coders, welders, mechanics and innovators can we produce?”
There is dignity in intellectual work.
There is dignity in skilled labour.
The mistake is ranking one above the other.
A society that worships certificates while neglecting competence eventually discovers that framed documents cannot build roads, repair machines, wire factories, manufacture products or create wealth.
The future belongs to people who can solve problems.
Whether they learned it in a lecture hall, a workshop, an apprenticeship centre or under a mango tree is secondary.
Because at the end of the day, the market does not award marks.
It awards value.
And value has never asked to see anybody’s certificate before writing the cheque.
May Nigeria win
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