Asher's Blog

When I speak about the generation that will build Africa’s roads, I do not mean only the people who will pour concrete or operate construction equipment. Before a society builds dependable roads, power plants, hospitals, factories and institutions, it must build the minds capable of designing, financing, governing and maintaining them. The first infrastructure is education.

Our children will take some things for granted that remain difficult for us today. That is how progress should work. They should not be surprised that electricity is reliable, a train arrives on time or a public record can be found. Our privilege is to build these systems; their privilege should be to begin from them and solve the next set of problems.

That future requires an education strategy connected to national ambition. We cannot educate millions of young people without deciding what capabilities the country will need in ten, twenty and thirty years. Nigeria needs excellent teachers and scholars, but it also needs engineers, technicians, nurses, doctors, builders, researchers, administrators, manufacturers and entrepreneurs. Education should enlarge the individual while also equipping the nation to do consequential work.

China’s development offers a useful lesson in scale and alignment. Its economic transformation combined basic education, technical capability, universities, overseas study, industrial growth and sustained public investment. The country did not treat education as a ceremonial sector separate from production. It developed people who could absorb knowledge, operate factories, improve processes, build infrastructure and eventually conduct advanced research.

Britain offers different lessons through institutions that have accumulated knowledge over long periods, respected professional standards, apprenticeships and universities with global research networks. We should learn selectively rather than copy either country. Nigeria’s system must fit our population, labour market, democratic values and development needs.

Several priorities are clear.

First, we must make teaching a serious profession. A country cannot say education matters while teachers are poorly prepared, badly supported and treated as people who accepted a lesser career. Recruitment should be selective, training should be continuous, performance should be supported and measured, and compensation should allow good teachers to remain in the classroom with dignity.

Second, foundational learning must come before impressive promises. A child who cannot read with understanding, reason mathematically or express an idea clearly has been denied access to almost every later opportunity. We should measure whether children are learning rather than celebrate enrolment alone, and we should intervene early when schools fail to produce the basics.

Third, technical and vocational education must be connected to real employers. Training centres should not graduate students on equipment that industry abandoned years ago. Businesses can help design curricula, provide apprenticeships and certify practical competence. A young person who can maintain an energy system, operate modern manufacturing equipment or manage a construction project possesses knowledge that is both intellectual and economically valuable.

Fourth, universities need stronger links to research, industry and public problems. Africa should invest in laboratories and scholarship, but research must also encounter the questions around us: energy reliability, tropical medicine, agriculture, urban transport, housing, water, security and public administration. The university should be a place where the nation’s hardest problems become serious intellectual work.

Fifth, we should send talented people abroad deliberately and build attractive routes for them to return or contribute across borders. Scholarships can be tied to priority disciplines and supported by research grants, credible jobs, professional autonomy and laboratories that make returning meaningful. This should not become coercion or punishment for studying abroad. The aim is brain circulation: knowledge, networks and capital flowing back even when a person’s life remains partly global.

Sixth, education should be open to responsible investment without surrendering public purpose. Private capital can build schools, training platforms, laboratories and education technology, but standards, access and outcomes must be protected. Investors should be rewarded for expanding quality, not merely for selling credentials to anxious families.

Finally, the system needs continuity. Education reform cannot be a collection of new slogans introduced by every administration. Curriculum, teacher development, infrastructure and assessment need long horizons, independent evaluation and public data. A democracy can sustain this through legislation, professional institutions, state-level experimentation and a national agreement that children’s learning is not a partisan project.

The roads we want will be designed by someone who is presently a child. The courts we want will be led by people now learning what justice means. The factories, hospitals and research institutions we imagine will depend on habits of discipline and curiosity being formed today. If we neglect the classroom, we are postponing every other ambition.

This generation has the responsibility to build, but it also has the rare privilege of deciding what the next generation will consider normal. We should build an education system strong enough to produce people who can build the roads—and wise enough to build institutions that keep those roads useful long after the original builders are gone.