There are truths that do not just hurt pride; they puncture illusions, strip hypocrisy, and leave us exposed to the reality we created. The Dangote case is one of them. Eleven thousand Indian technicians were recruited because Nigeria could not find one hundred locally, in a country of 235 million people, Africa’s largest economy, a self-proclaimed giant of the continent. This is a clinical diagnosis of a disease that does not affect only Abuja; it affects the entire African body. Many cry scandal, but I see a mirror, and a mirror never lies.
Africa was not defeated by tanks but by polytechnics. Dangote is accused of preferring Indians, but that is false. Dangote prefers those who know how to run a refinery, and that is the simple truth. It is not India that humiliates us, but 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 it. While we churn out theoretical degrees, India trains thousands of operational technicians. The Indians did not take Lagos by force; they came with their screwdrivers, software and skills.
Without skills, even our billionaires become dependent. Dangote is not the problem; he is proof that wealth is not enough to compensate for weak human capital. We can have oil, bauxite, gold, cobalt and lithium, but without people who can transform them, we remain tenants of our own development. We provide land, raw materials, tax breaks and sometimes even public funds, while others provide brains. In the end, they leave with the biggest share of added value. Africa is a continent where a port can be built in eighteen months with foreign labor, yet it takes twenty-five years to modernize a technical high school. That alone should wake us up.
Technical education has become our silent Waterloo. Our technical high schools, when they still exist, run on outdated machines from the 1980s, with unretrained teachers, frozen curricula and workshops that have turned into dusty museums. Students in these schools are often viewed as less brilliant than those in general education, and that is where the problem begins. That is where India beats us, not at Dangote, not in Lagos, but in the classroom. African parents dream of lawyers, doctors and MPs, rarely of industrial mechanics, electromechanics, maintenance technicians, process engineers or other technical professionals, even though the modern world depends entirely on them.
The Nigerian problem is African. The same story plays out in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Cameroon, Senegal and beyond. 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 and our roads are asphalted by foreigners. We applaud these projects as if modernity were merely about taking photos at inaugurations. Real development begins when we no longer need foreign support for basic operations.
The mental revolution required is simple: every technical high school must become a talent factory. There is no magic, no slogans and no empty visions. Development depends on qualified welders, certified electronics technicians, industrial mechanics, petrochemical technicians and IT professionals who can code, repair, program and assemble. Africa must professionalize its technical education on a massive scale. Not two hundred students per year, not one thousand, but fifty thousand to one hundred thousand technicians per country every year. Only then will Dangote, and all the other industrialists on the continent, stop looking elsewhere for expertise.
The real Dangote truth is that this is not a scandal; it is a wake-up call. Africa will never be respected as long as it relies on others to do what it should have learned to do itself. Dangote does not humiliate Africa; he forces us to confront the truth. The question is not why he employs eleven thousand Indians. The real question is why our education systems have not produced eleven thousand Nigerians who can replace them. That question applies to the DRC, Kenya, Angola, Ghana and every African nation.
Conclusion: The continent that wants to take off must first learn to run its engine. As long as we do not understand that the struggle of the twenty-first century is technological rather than geopolitical, we will remain giants with clay feet. As long as our technical high schools remain pedagogical graveyards, others will continue to work for us, surpass us and dictate how we manage our own wealth. The day Lagos, Kinshasa or Nairobi train ten thousand qualified technicians every year, Indians, Chinese, Filipinos and Turks will be the ones knocking on our doors. On that day, Africa will stop being a market and finally become the world’s workshop.
