Question that haunts Nigeria

In Nigeria, there is hardly a week without meetings; security briefings for the president, emergency sessions in the House of Representatives, special sittings in the Senate, committee hearings, and stakeholder engagements. Each ministry, department, and agency of government has its own committees.  And yet, the problems persist. Insecurity refuses to disappear. Unemployment grows. Inflation bites. […]

In Nigeria, there is hardly a week without meetings; security briefings for the president, emergency sessions in the House of Representatives, special sittings in the Senate, committee hearings, and stakeholder engagements. Each ministry, department, and agency of government has its own committees.

 And yet, the problems persist. Insecurity refuses to disappear. Unemployment grows. Inflation bites. Infrastructure decays.

 One is left wondering what exactly is being discussed in all these meetings. 

 There was a time when Nigerian students had only one major fear, which is examinations. Sleepless nights were spent revising textbooks and lecture notes, driven by the desire to achieve academic goals.

 Today, there is a new fear, deeper and more unsettling: what happens after graduation? 

After years of study in universities, polytechnics, or colleges of education, and after families have invested millions of naira in tuition, accommodation, and upkeep, graduates are confronted with the uncertainty of joblessness.

 The government’s advice has long been: learn a trade or acquire entrepreneurship skills. But even that pathway is riddled with disappointment.

 Entrepreneurship training in most Nigerian tertiary institutions is little more than a box-ticking exercise,  skeletal meetings, heavy on theory, light on practical skills. Many students graduate without knowing how to convert a classroom business plan into a real-world income stream.

 As a result, fresh graduates often have to spend additional money on private entrepreneurship centres, paying steep fees to gain practical knowledge they should have received in school.

 This leaves some asking a painful question: why go to university at all, if the end result is to learn a trade elsewhere?

 This is how the notion, “Tertiary education is a scam in Nigeria”,  begins to take root in the minds of young people. It is not an outright rejection of education, but a reflection of disillusionment with a system that promises so much and delivers so little.

 When government meetings fail to translate into policies that create jobs, strengthen industries, and stimulate entrepreneurship, the young lose faith not just in leaders, but in the very structures that are supposed to support them. 

And so we return to the young Kenyan boy’s question, rephrased for Nigeria: 

What have all these committees in the National Assembly been discussing all these years, if the lives of ordinary Nigerians remain largely unchanged?

What is the purpose of high-level security meetings, if rural farmers cannot go to their farms without fear of bandits?

What is the point of endless legislative sittings, if the resolutions never leave the chambers to become real policies that alleviate, mitigate, and cushion the hardship of the people?

A meeting is not a solution. A meeting is only as useful as the action it produces.

Until Nigerian leaders realise this, until committee rooms produce more than communiqués, until summits deliver more than photo opportunities, the haunting question of that young boy will remain unanswered.

And perhaps, one day, the youth will stop asking. Not because the answer has been found, but because they have stopped believing one exists.

  

Maria Livinus, is a student of Mass Communication, University of Maiduguri