Post by Regina Alaine (@Reyna_Nnamdi)

*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🇳🇬🇳🇬🇳🇬

0 likes · 0 comments · 0 shares