By Charles L. B. Bationo
There are truths that don’t just hurt pride. They puncture illusions, strip hypocrisy, and leave us naked, facing our own creation. The Dangote case is one of them.
11,000 Indian technicians were recruited because Nigeria couldn’t find 100 locally. In a country of 235 million people, Africa’s largest economy, a self-proclaimed giant of the continent.
This is the clinical diagnosis of a disease that doesn’t just affect Abuja: it affects the entire African body. Many cry scandal. I see a mirror. And a mirror never lies.
Africa wasn’t defeated by tanks, but by polytechnics
Dangote is accused of preferring Indians. False. Dangote prefers those who know how to run a refinery. Period. It’s not India that humiliates us; it’s our inability to produce skills that match our ambitions.
While Africa organises summits, national assemblies, and endless conferences, India builds classrooms. While we politicise technical education, India professionalises. While we churn out theoretical degrees, India trains thousands of operational technicians.
The Indians didn’t take Lagos by force. They enter with their screwdrivers, software, and skills.
Without skills, even our billionaires become dependent
Dangote isn’t the problem. He’s proof that wealth isn’t enough to compensate for weak human capital. We can have oil, bauxite, gold, cobalt, lithium… But without people who can transform them, we remain tenants of our own development.
We provide: land, raw materials, tax breaks, sometimes even public funds… Others provide brains. And in the end, they walk away with the largest share of the added value.
Africa is a continent where a port can be built in 18 months… with foreign labour. But it takes 25 years to modernise a technical high school. That should wake us up.
Technical education: our silent Waterloo
Our technical high schools, when they still exist, run on: 1980s machines, unretrained teachers, frozen curricula, workshops turned into dusty museums, students deemed “less brilliant” than those in general education. That’s where it starts. That’s where India beats us. Not at Dangote. Not in Lagos. At school.
African parents dream of lawyers, doctors, MPs… Rarely of industrial mechanics, electromechanics, maintenance technicians, or process engineers. Our societies continue to despise technical trades, even though the modern world relies entirely on them.
The Nigerian problem is African: DRC, Kenya, Cameroon, Senegal… same fight
What’s happening in Nigeria today is no exception. It’s the announced future of all African countries if they don’t wake up.
In our countries, our power plants are repaired by foreigners. Our mines are calibrated by foreigners. Our dams are built by foreigners. Our data centres are configured by foreigners. Our roads are asphalted by foreigners. And we applaud, as if modernity were just about inaugural photos.
Real development starts when we no longer need them for basic operations.
The mental revolution: turning every technical high school into a talent factory
No magic. No slogans. No empty “2030 visions”. Development is: qualified welders, certified electronics technicians, industrial mechanics, petrochemical technicians, and IT professionals who can code, repair, programme, and assemble.
Africa must massively professionalise its technical education. Not 200 students per year. Not 1,000. We need 50,000 to 100,000 technicians per country, every year. Only then will Dangote — and all the Dangotes of the continent — no longer need to look elsewhere.
The Dangote truth: it’s not a scandal, it’s a wake-up call
Africa will never be respected as long as it asks others to do what it should have learned to do itself. Dangote doesn’t humiliate Africa. He wakes us up.
The question isn’t: “Why does he employ 11,000 Indians?” The real question is: “Why haven’t our education systems produced 11,000 Nigerians who can replace them?” And that applies to DRC. To Kenya. To Angola. To Ghana. To all of us.
Conclusion: The continent that wants to take off must first learn to run its engine
As long as we don’t understand that the 21st-century struggle is no longer geopolitical but technological, we’ll remain giants with clay feet. As long as our technical high schools are pedagogical graveyards, others will come work for us, surpass us, and tell us how to manage our own wealth.
The day Lagos, Kinshasa, or Nairobi trains 10,000 qualified technicians per year, Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, Turks… will knock on our doors. And that day, Africa will stop being a market. It will become the world’s workshop.
