photo of Unemployed Nigerians There are truths that don’t just hurt pride; they puncture illusions, strip hypocrisy and leave us naked, facing our own creation. The Dangote case is one of them.
Over 11,000 Indian technicians were recruited because Nigeria couldn’t find 100 locally qualified. That is a country of 235 million people, Africa’s largest economy, and a self-proclaimed giant of the continent.
This is the clinical diagnosis of a disease that doesn’t just affect Abuja: it affects the entire African body. Many cry scandal. I see a mirror. And a mirror never lies.
Africa wasn’t defeated by tanks, but by polytechnics
Dangote is accused of preferring Indians. False. Dangote prefers those who know how to run a refinery. Period. It’s not India that humiliates us; it’s our inability to produce skills that match our ambitions.
While Africa organizes summits, national assemblies and endless conferences, India builds classrooms. While we politicize technical education, India professionalizes. While we churn out theoretical degrees, India trains thousands of operational technicians.
The Indians didn’t take Lagos by force. They enter with their screwdrivers, software, and skills.
Without skills, even our billionaires become dependent
Dangote isn’t the problem. He’s proof that wealth isn’t enough to compensate for weak human capital. We can have oil, bauxite, gold, cobalt, lithium and many more, but without people who can transform them. And for that, we remain tenants of our own development.
We provide land, raw materials, tax breaks, sometimes even public funds while others provide modern productive and functional brains. And in the end, they leave with the biggest share of added value.
Africa is a continent where a port can be built in 18 months with foreign labour. But it takes 25 years to modernize a technical high school. That should wake us up.
Technical education is obviously our silent Waterloo Our technical high schools, when they still exist, run on the 1980’s machines, unretrained teachers, frozen curricula, workshops turned into dusty museums with students deemed “less brilliant” than those in general education. That’s where it starts. That’s where India beats us. Not at Dangote. Not in Lagos. At school.
African parents dream of lawyers, doctors, MPs… Rarely of industrial mechanics, electromechanics, maintenance technicians and process engineers. Our societies continue to despise technical trades, even though the modern world relies entirely on them.
The Nigerian problem is African: DRC, Kenya, Cameroon, Senegal and others. It is the same fight
What’s happening in Nigeria today is no exception. It’s the announced future of all African countries if they don’t wake up.
In our countries, our power plants are repaired by foreigners. Our mines are calibrated by foreigners. Our dams are built by foreigners. Our data centers are configured by foreigners. Our roads are asphalted by foreigners. And we applaud, as if modernity was just about inaugural photos.
Real development starts when we no longer need them for basic operations.
The mental revolution begins in turning every technical high school into a talent factory. No magic. No slogans. No empty “2030 visions.” Development is to have qualified welders, certified electronics technicians, industrial mechanics, petrochemical technicians, IT professionals who can code, repair, program and assemble.
Africa must massively professionalize its technical education. Not 200 students per year. Not 1,000. We need 50,000 to 100,000 technicians per country, every year. Only then will Dangote, and all the Dangotes of the continent, no longer need to look elsewhere.
The Dangote’s reality is not a scandal. It’s a wake-up call
Africa will never be respected as long as it asks others to do what it should have learned to do itself. Dangote doesn’t humiliate Africa. He wakes us up.
The question isn’t why does he employ 11,000 Indians? The real question is why haven’t our education systems produced 11,000 Nigerians who can replace them? And that applies to DRC, Kenya, Angola, Ghana and others.
The continent that wants to take off must first learn to run its engine
As long as we don’t understand that the 21st-century struggle is no longer geopolitical but technological, we’ll remain giants with clay feet. As long as our technical high schools are pedagogical graveyards, others will come to work for us, surpassing us, and telling us how to manage our own wealth.
The day Lagos, Kinshasa, or Nairobi train 10,000 qualified technicians per year, Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, Turks will knock on our doors. And that day, Africa will stop being a market. It will become the world’s workshop.
