Any country’s higher education system is intended to serve as a vital tool for educating the populace about the components of social peace and order while also connecting them to the state’s development aims and policies. To put it another way, the higher education system is one of the most important ways that a country defines and communicates its paths to prosperity and advancement. One essential element of the dynamism of higher education is the university system. Because of this, postsecondary education is frequently in line with national goals all around the world. This is made abundantly evident in the Nigerian National Policy on Education. “(a) contribute to national development through high level manpower training; (b) provide accessible and affordable high quality learning opportunities in formal and informal education in response to the needs and interests of all Nigerians; (c) provide high quality career counseling and lifelong learning programs that prepare students with the knowledge and skills for self-reliance and the world of work; (d) reduce skill shortages through the production of skilled manpower relevant to the needs of the labor market; (e) promote and encourage scholarship, entrepreneurship, and community service; (f) forge and cement national unity; and (g) promote national and international understanding and interaction. These are the goals of tertiary education, as defined by the broader educational philosophy.
Higher education’s ability to mediate learning and growth for Nigerians and the Nigerian state has been weakened by a number of dysfunctional fissures that have developed within Nigeria’s educational and tertiary system over the country’s lengthy 66-year history. In order to identify what has gone wrong, there are two essential indicators. The first is the appalling lack of communication between the government and the Nigerian academic and intellectual elite, which drives the country’s higher education system. This anti-intellectualism guarantees that the policy architecture of the government does not profit from policy intelligence produced by think tanks and universities. The reduction of postsecondary education to obtaining degrees, certificates, and diplomas is the second symptom. Therefore, Nigeria’s obsession with certification suggests that universities release graduates into the workforce who lack the necessary foundation to significantly alter the country’s socioeconomic landscape or impact its national objectives. Therefore, manpower development lost its functional and crucial edge and crumbled under the weight of priorities that were not aligned.
To put it succinctly, colleges have lost touch with their original purpose, which is a fundamental way to conceive the dysfunction of the higher education system and its detachment from Nigeria’s national goals. When combined with Nigeria’s high youth population, human capital, and potential for citizenship, this becomes extremely unstable. With more than 60% of its population under thirty, Nigeria is one of the youngest nations. This implies more than just that young people are university undergraduates and graduates. It also indicates that Nigeria has a sizable pool of prospective human resources that may be used to advance the country.
These facts guarantee that the university system has been rehabilitated by successive Nigerian governments in order to address its dysfunction and reroute its dynamics towards better functionality on behalf of the Nigerian state and her society. How successful these attempts have been is still up in the air. I need to emphasize that we don’t seem to have achieved much progress by citing the depressing youth unemployment numbers. Therefore, the reformer in me says that the university system needs to undergo an urgent and important overhaul. This reforming will take place at the nexus of youth demography, technology advancement, creativity and innovation, and governance.
American novelist Adam Grant does a great job of trying to capture the spirit of higher education. He asserts that “the knowledge you acquire in your head is not the mark of higher education.” It’s the abilities you get regarding learning. This essential idea is persuasively presented in my brief 2010 monograph, The Joy of Learning, which explores the meaning of learning both inside and outside of the official tertiary institution. According to Grant, reevaluating our existing conception of education and the university system is necessary to comprehend what learning actually entails—that is, what it means to gain abilities that enable one to learn. As it is, the system’s ability to produce skilled labor is what determines how we see higher education. There is nothing at all wrong with this goal. Except that in the end, we will either be producing robots that lack spirituality or empathy in the workplace, or we will be discarding graduates who, despite their many talents and abilities, lacked morality and compassion.
Two questions must be asked in order to have a proper understanding of education and how the university can support it for the benefit of both individuals and the Nigerian state. Since education is largely about the kids and their power to change the future of any community or state, these questions are pertinent. So, the first question is: what are we teaching the young people of Nigeria? Second, how are we getting them ready for that future? The ongoing reform of Nigeria’s university system should be guided by these two questions. We need a paradigm shift in thinking about the purpose of education and how the university may be changed to achieve it in order to respond to the first question. Education is not solely for certificates or job. Wendel Berry puts it better than I could: “Humanity is what is being developed in a university. [W]Universities are required to create or assist in creating human beings in the broadest meaning of the word—not merely skilled laborers or informed citizens, but also accountable heirs and contributors to human civilization. The notion that good work and good citizenship are the natural byproducts of creating a good—that is, a fully developed—human being is the foundation of the concept of a university, which unites all the fields into one. Nigeria has a great chance to reestablish contact with its children and create a capable and trustworthy citizenry that serves as the cornerstone of social order if this knowledge is taken seriously. The Nigerian youth are thus prepared for a future in which they can completely connect with what it means to be a human being in Nigeria through a paradigm shift in the concept of education.
Therefore, the system of higher education should strike a balance between the development of manpower and character. And this brings us to the crucial dynamics of change management that will enable the university system to support transformation for the Nigerian state as part of the broader framework for higher education. The second question, “How are we to prepare the youth for that human future?” is essentially this. In order to answer this question, the university system must be recalibrated in a way that allows us to reconsider and change the definition of education. Let’s center the important reform concerns around these queries: (i) Should universities give priority to employment, social mobility, skill development, and knowledge creation in terms of relevance? (ii) In the framework of online and hybrid education service delivery models, how does technology influence and impact teaching, learning, and research? (iii) In light of the increasing globalization of education and the developing knowledge society, how can the university system strike a balance between cross-disciplinary research and learning and the conventional disciplinary boundaries, which are increasingly restrictive? (iv) Which funding schemes and governance models can best assist Nigeria’s new model of sustainable funding and university autonomy? (v) How can the university prioritize the broad and fundamental importance of the humanities, social sciences, and liberal arts while simultaneously strategically managing the critical emergence of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) field? (vi) As a crucial tactic to help the economy deal with the rate at which technology makes skills outdated in a highly globalized labor market, how will universities prioritize the necessary balance between adult education and ongoing skill development? (vii) Without sacrificing their research agenda and academic integrity, how can the university system support and expand research and development (R&D) as well as entrepreneurship education, which is based on innovation and industry partnership?
Although it satisfies Nigeria’s development goals (and even parents’ desire for a purpose for their children), an excessive emphasis on education as a return on investment needs to be positioned within a broader goal, particularly in a critical postcolonial setting like Nigerian society. Education must equip us to coexist with others who are not of the same gender, status, ethnicity, or religion as us in any setting we find ourselves in, including our homes, workplaces, communities, villages, online communities, and schools. An education that reconnects Nigerian kids to their humanity and educates them for life has the added advantage of preparing them to confront the difficulties of the modern world. In order to help Nigeria enter the knowledge society and the fourth and fifth industrial revolutions, for example, such an education equips students to deal with life’s challenges and the needs of new technology and innovation. We can then be confident that learning has begun to take place in the higher education system. And we have begun a future in which young Nigerians would have begun to confront important concerns about not only coexisting and acting morally with one another, but also with clever machines in the era of artificial intelligence.
• Taken from the speech given on January 30, 2026, by Prof. Tunji Olaopa, Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, in his capacity as Chairman of the Federal University of Agriculture (FUNAAB), Abeokuta’s 2026 Convocation Lecture Program.