There are moments when a single commercial decision acts as a burning mirror, stripping away illusions to expose a systemic truth. The recruitment of 11,000 Indian technicians to staff Africa’s largest refinery in Nigeria, a nation of 235 million and the continent’s biggest economy, is precisely such a moment.
This is no mere staffing story; it is a clinical diagnosis of a continental disease. The true scandal lies not in Aliko Dangote’s pragmatic choice, but in our collective, decades-long failure to produce the requisite technical skills to match our industrial rhetoric.
While Africa convenes summits, other developing nations have been methodically building the workshops that underpin 21st-century industrialisation. We politicise technical education; nations like India professionalise it.
This deficit of certified, operation-ready technicians is the direct result of the chronic underfunding of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET), a policy failure threatening to relegate Africa to permanent tenancy in its own economic house.
The core of this crisis is sustained financial neglect, reflecting deep-seated societal prejudice. National education budgets disproportionately favour the general academic stream, particularly universities, while treating polytechnics and technical colleges as secondary priorities.
Data from UNESCO consistently shows that Sub-Saharan Africa allocates a fraction of the per-student investment to TVET compared to academic pathways, despite TVET’s inherently higher costs for tools, consumables, and machinery.
This funding bias creates an environment of decay, the result of which we are all seeing today. Technical institutions operate with obsolete, often non-functional machinery. Workshops that should train for automation and advanced petrochemical processes are dusty museums. Our curricula remain frozen, bearing little resemblance to a labour market driven by digital controls.
How can we produce technicians for a state-of-the-art refinery when their trainers have never interacted with modern Computer Numerical Control (CNC) systems?
The signal is clear: a profound lack of political will. Consequently, despite our abundant oil, lithium, cobalt, and bauxite, we remain raw material providers while others provide the indispensable skills and claim the value addition.
This financial malaise is exacerbated by a perilous trend that prioritises academic vanity over national need: the conversion of polytechnics into conventional universities.
These new universities will produce more theory-steeped graduates clamouring for scarce white-collar jobs, while the urgent demand for certified welders, industrial mechanics, and process technicians goes unanswered.
This is a catastrophic misallocation of educational resources, actively working against stated goals of industrialisation and infrastructure development. Building and maintaining refineries, power grids, and rail networks is not done by PhDs in humanities alone, but by armies of highly skilled, practically trained technicians.
By accelerating this trend, we are not solving unemployment; we are engineering a crisis of unemployability. We flood the market with graduates ill-equipped for existing jobs while gutting the sector meant to create them.
Underpinning this policy failure is a deep-seated cultural disdain for technical trades. Parental aspiration is overwhelmingly fixed on producing lawyers and bankers, not master electricians or precision fabricators.
TVET carries the stigma of a fallback for the academically weak, a perception that ignores the sophisticated blend of cognitive knowledge and practical skill required by modern technicians.
This stigma ensures a brain drain. Bright students with mechanical aptitude are steered away, leading to low enrolment. Those few who do acquire skills often seek respect and compensation abroad.
Furthermore, the government’s own low-priority signalling discourages serious private-sector investment in collaborative training.
A vicious cycle ensues: industry finds local graduates unprepared and looks overseas, which in turn justifies further underinvestment in TVET.
The TVET crisis is symptomatic of a broader educational lethargy. At the university level, a severe disconnect from industry persists. Institutions are routinely criticised for producing unemployable graduates through obsolete curricula.
This tertiary failure is built on a crumbling foundation. Primary and secondary education across much of the continent suffers from inadequate teacher quality and a lack of basic resources, resulting in weak foundational literacy and numeracy.
A student who cannot grasp fundamental mathematics is irrevocably shut out from mastering industrial mechanics. This systemic erosion ensures the human material entering advanced training is often unprepared, making the task of producing a skilled workforce nearly insurmountable.
The importation of 11,000 technicians is a profound wake-up call. It poses a brutal question: why have our systems, from Lagos to Nairobi and Accra to Kinshasa, failed to produce 11,000 certified individuals for these jobs?
In this technological age, Africa’s path demands an immediate, radical reorientation.
First, a massive financial reprioritisation. National budgets must reflect TVET’s strategic importance, allocating capital to modernise workshops with state-of-the-art, digital equipment and ensure sustainable funding for maintenance.
This investment must be coupled with legislated partnerships between industry and TVET institutions. Curricula must be co-developed; apprenticeships and job placements must be integral. Tax incentives should draw private-sector investment directly into training centres.
Simultaneously, a continent-wide campaign is needed to rebrand technical careers as paths to high income, dignity, and national service.
Certification frameworks must be strengthened to guarantee a qualified technician is recognised as a master of their craft. Furthermore, strategic legislative action, such as establishing rigorous regulatory commissions in sectors like private security or renewable energy installation, can create immediate, high-demand markets for TVET graduates, injecting dynamism and demonstrating tangible value.
The struggle for Africa’s place in the 21st century is fundamentally a skills-based contest. Real development begins when we no longer require foreign expertise for basic operational functions.
The day our systems begin to produce 50,000 certified technicians annually in key economies, foreign experts will arrive not as necessary managers but as collaborative partners.
That day, Africa will cease to be merely a resource market and begin its transformation into a workshop of innovation and self-sufficiency.
Sarumi is a professor of strategic leadership & digital transformation at Prowess University, Delaware, US.
