We have high rate of unemployment in Africa because our educational institutions are producing job seekers instead of solution providers. According to reports, Nigeria (the most populous African country) graduates approximately 450,000 students from a total of 170 universities annually! Africa don’t need job seekers, we already have enough of them, what Africa needs are pathfinders and solution providers. We need more of innovators, inventors and change gladiators in our institutions of learning and not just certificate and degree seekers. Graduates are supposed to be employers of labour and wealth creators, not job seekers. When the rate at which a system is producing job seekers is exponentially higher than the rate at which entrepreneurs are evolving, the end result is always unemployment.
In ‘The Meaning of General Education’ (Miller, 1988), the idea of degree education was fully formed during the industrialisation age to serve as reservoir of cheap labour for industries. The school system was built during the Industrial Revolution to feed the industries with labourers whose value is seen only as a means of production. The original design has not really changed much over the years as it was meant to make graduates into labourers/job seekers and not entrepreneurs/solution providers.
While the Western education system has been upgraded over the years to embrace critical thinking and creativity, ours in Africa is still anti-intellectual and hostile to new ways of thinking. We need to work assiduously on transforming our educational system in Africa from paper-based education to skill and value-based education.
Paper-based education only produces clerks, labourers, administrators and managers whose value are only seen in how well they simply obey the line of command. We need a special kind of educational that will produce disruptors, innovators, entrepreneurs and change-gladiators.
Our educational system in Africa is a time-bomb waiting to explode if something urgent and drastic is not done. The system was faultily designed to produce workers for big corporations, it was never designed to solve problems in the society. The school system introduced during industrialisation was meant to promote remembering and not critical thinking for the sake of creating good employees who don’t think but can remember.
Western education produces African graduates who are only seen as a means of production that have graduated from the African school of remembering! Our kind of educational system in Africa cannot solve problems neither can anyone who is a product of it come out to challenge the system, except the individual involved is an outlier. When an educational system is misconceived, the consequences are leadership problems, unemployment, class struggle and economic instability. There is nothing that fuels unemployment in Africa like our dysfunctional educational system.
The dominant purpose of education should not just be in preparing young people for employment in industries. We need a more robust and holistic form of education that will be value-based and also make room for problem-solving, “multiple intelligences”, emotional literacy, self-discovery, self-awareness, mindfulness, moral discipline, skill acquisition, and capacity development.
In 2012, 13,000 graduates applied as truck drivers in the Dangote group in Nigeria, out of which there were six Ph.D, 704 Masters and over 8,460 Bachelor degree holders! The company only needed 100 drivers but received overwhelming applications. In a growing economy, it is rather shocking that Ph.D and Masters degree holders were seeking placement as drivers: a strong indication that there is something fundamentally wrong with our educational system.
The Silicon Valley has been a strong feed for the world’s technological advancement. The history behind the evolution of the silicon Valley cannot be written without mentioning the contribution of Stanford University. The pertinent question is this: When will African universities start producing graduates that will change their communities? When will African universities start solving the problem of unemployment instead of contributing to it? How many African universities are truly solving problems in their host nations? Silicon Valley has become the world’s headquarter for technological advancements and breakthroughs through the great minds that Stanford University has continually produced over the years. Stanford University has laid a good example for other universities to follow in the sense that the purpose of a university is not just to produce graduates, but to solve problems in their communities and the world at large.
It was the Stanford University leadership and graduates that gave birth to Silicon Valley. When will African universities wake up from their slumber and help solve the myriad of problems plaguing the continents, instead of hanging Africa’s fate on aids from donor nations and organisations?
The biggest innovation in American education is the fusion of markets and universities. When will African universities see education as a tool of transformation in their host communities? Many African universities have massive acres of land that can house industries and even support mechanized farming, but are blinded to the potentials that they carry. Until African universities start forming a productive and problem-solving nexus with organizations outside the wall of their institutions, they will continuously be part of the problem and not the solution to unemployment.
My candid advice to graduates and students in institutions is to think wide, deep and outside the box. Take volunteer jobs. Do not be afraid to navigate fields that are different from your field of learning. Your future career will require you to pull information from different fields to come up with creative solutions to future problems. Start by reading as much as you can about anything and everything that interests you. Once you get to college, consider double majoring or minoring in completely different fields. Trust me, it will pay off in the long run.
The world will never remember you for the certificates and degrees that you are acquiring; it will only remember you for the problems that you have solved. So, instead of acquiring certificate to increase your social status, acquire skills that will equip you more to solve problems. As a graduate, if the next degree you are going for has nothing to do with equipping you more to solve problems, then you are wasting your future and potentials. Your status don’t attract wealth, it is your skills and capacity to solve problems that do. Your degrees and certificates don’t attract wealth, your ability to solve problems do. When next you are asked to choose between elevating your status and acquisition of skills, never forget that the former is only for show while the latter makes you a solution.
The best career path decision must never be in relation to the salary you want to earn; it should rather be in response to the problems you want to solve. Salary minded people have already put a limit on how far they can go in life while people that are pre-occupied with the problems they want to solve with their passion and gifts are limitless. The poor live on salary, the rich live on profits. Salary is limited while profit is limitless.
