28/07/2026
LEARN A SKILL: CERTIFICATE IS HIGHLY OVERRATED
There's a strange thing is happening in Nigeria of today.
It typically costs 20 precious years to climb the educational ladder in this country.
6 years in primary school.
6 years in secondary school.
4 to 6 years in university.
1 year of NYSC.
That is roughly 6,500 to 7,000 days invested into preparing for life.
But when life arrives and asks a simple question:
“What pr0bIēm can you solve?”
Silence.
Not because you're is unintelligent.
Not because you're is lazy.
But because somewhere along the journey, we confused education with certification.
Our educational system prepares to pass exams, not to create value or solve pr0bIēms.
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 trãgēdy is not that one earns more than the other.
The trãgēdy is that we keep preparing millions of young people for a race that no longer exists.
We celebrate gaining ADMISSIONS and signing out 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 should tell you that 990 of them 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 pãînfuI irony?
The people we once looked down upon are increasingly becoming the people we depend on.
When your transformer fails at midnight, you do not call a philosophy graduate, who opted for any available course in pursuit of certificate rather than enrolling for an APPRENTICESHIP program while preparing to retake JAMB.
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 says it the way it is, without pretending like we do sometimes, life 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 also 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 PR0BLEMS.
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.
Again, I ask WHAT PR0BLEMS CAN YOU SOLVE?
