Why Social Sciences are not the problem
Last week, Nigeria’s Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, made headlines when he remarked that the country is “already saturated” with graduates of social science-related courses, insisting that what we need now are “problem solvers.” This statement is unfortunately part of a long-standing trend among Nigerian leadership to undervalue and dismiss the social sciences as […]
Last week, Nigeria’s Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, made headlines when he remarked that the country is “already saturated” with graduates of social science-related courses, insisting that what we need now are “problem solvers.” This statement is unfortunately part of a long-standing trend among Nigerian leadership to undervalue and dismiss the social sciences as developmentally irrelevant. But this view is not only ill-informed; it is dangerous.
To imply that social science graduates are not problem solvers is to grossly misunderstand both the essence of education and the nature of Nigeria’s most pressing challenges. The crises we face, ethno-religious conflict, widespread insecurity, institutional decay, trust deficits, and elite capture are not simply technical problems. They are deeply social, cultural, and political. Solving them requires more than engineers or IT experts; it requires thinkers who understand human systems, power structures, historical context, and social behaviour.
If development were solely about machines and mathematics, then countries like Somalia or Libya, once filled with engineers and oil wealth would be models of prosperity. But true national development is about people, systems, and relationships. It is about values, governance, trust, culture, and collective behaviour. And these are precisely the domains where social scientists work.
If Nigeria wants to progress, we must learn from countries that have already walked the path of development. The United States, one of the world’s most developed nations, consistently invests in the social sciences. Institutions like Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government or the Brookings Institution play major roles in shaping national policy. The New Deal that rescued the US economy during the Great Depression was as much a political and sociological project as it was economic. Social scientists helped craft the ideas that underpinned welfare systems and labour reforms.
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In Germany, the success of their vocational and education systems rests not just on technical training, but on decades of sociological research into workforce dynamics and educational psychology. In China, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) is a state-backed think tank that influences major policy directions. Far from being “over-saturated” with social science graduates, these countries have institutionalised their relevance.
Nigeria’s problem is not the number of sociology or political science graduates; it is what we do with their knowledge, or more accurately, how we ignore it. We build roads, but neglect social planning. We launch security operations without understanding the root causes of disaffection or radicalisation. We reform education without asking how children actually learn or how cultural factors influence their perception of schooling.
What the minister’s comments reveal is a narrow, technocratic mindset that reduces development to infrastructure and market logic. But nations are not machines; they are human ecosystems. You can’t fix a system you don’t understand, and social science provides the tools to understand people, power, relationships, and institutions.
Furthermore, this type of thinking undermines the future of education in Nigeria. When a federal minister devalues entire disciplines, he sends a dangerous signal to students, parents, and universities. It delegitimises careers in public policy, governance, civic engagement, anthropology, and more, all of which are fundamental to building a modern, inclusive society.
This is not to dismiss the importance of STEM or innovation. Indeed, we need engineers, doctors, and data scientists. But we also need people who can interpret policy impact, mediate conflict, analyse voter behaviour, and design inclusive systems of governance. Social scientists are not decoration, they are the people who explain why a rural mother might refuse to give birth in a free health center, or why young people do not trust elections, or why security budgets fail to deliver peace.
In dismissing social science graduates as “non-problem solvers,” we risk compounding the very problems we hope to solve. It is time to reverse this thinking. Nigeria must revalue knowledge, especially the kind that doesn’t produce immediate profit but cultivates long-term stability and understanding.
Zanna Samaila wrote from Damaturu