The “School Is a Scam” Argument Has a Blind Spot. It’s Costing Africa.
Aliko Dangote confirmed this week that his $20 billion refinery’s September IPO has already drawn more than $2 billion in private placement interest. In the same news cycle, he is finalizing a $17 billion mega-refinery for East Africa. They are the largest privately financed industrial projects in African history.
Dangote’s refinery and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) signal a new era. Africa does not need western leadership in its infrastructure and industrial development. Beneath the headlines of progress there is a question -one neither policymakers nor the continent’s young people are answering honestly. The question is -who will operate these large infrastructure and industrial projects?
At peak construction of the Lagos refinery, over 30,000 Nigerians worked on-site. Alongside them: roughly 6,400 Indian and 3,200 Chinese specialists. Rumors at the time put the Indian figure at over 10,000 and framed it as deliberate exclusion of local labor.
The real number was lower but the explanation should be worrying. Advanced engineering and scientific expertise are not available locally in the depth required. So they are flown in.
Infrastructure is built once. Whoever holds the operating skills captures the salaries, the supervisory ladder, the training contracts, the consulting fees, and eventually the equity stakes that follow technical authority. The construction phase is a moment. The professional class that runs the asset is permanent.
If Africans own the refinery but expatriates run it, the continent has traded one dependence for another. The flag is local. The expertise is rented. There is a name for this, and it is professional colonization.
While this is happening, a confident message is spreading across African social media -formal education is a trap. Degrees do not pay. The smart move is to skip the classroom, learn a trade, build a hustle.
The frustration behind this message is legitimate. Youth unemployment prospects are declining. Curricula are decades behind the labor market. Graduates emerge fluent in examination, lacking in theory and stranded in practice.
Yet, policymakers seem to be ‘beating around the bush’ while some educational institutions confirm the narrative by using the influencers who push it as brand ambassadors.
But the conclusion is wrong, and it is wrong at exactly the moment Africa can least afford it.
Consider something as ordinary as the screen you are reading this on. Every pixel is an entry in a matrix. When the image rotates, scales, or sharpens, the processor is multiplying matrices millions of times per second. The same math runs the AI models recognizing faces in your photos, the optimization engines blending fuel grades at a refinery, and the control systems holding a distillation column at temperature. It is taught, often badly, as linear algebra in secondary school.
A young person who watches a hustle-culture influencer and opts out of traditional education is making a rational decision inside a broken system. They are also, in aggregate, handing the next fifty years of African industrial labor to foreign professionals.
Across the continent, critical minerals corridors, data centers, fertilizer plants, and defense-adjacent processing facilities are being scoped. The skills gap will not close itself, and it will not close on the timeline these projects require unless governments act with unusual urgency.
Policymakers must treat industrial skills as infrastructure. Roads and ports get sovereign budgets and ten-year plans. Process engineering pipelines, control systems training, and refinery operations certification do not. They should.
Secondary and tertiary curricula must be rewritten around the industries actually being built. Linear algebra without computational application is a museum exhibit. Chemistry without commissioning context is a hobby. Ministries of education should be in the same room as ministries of industry, and both should be in the same room as the private sector investors. Expatriate work permits must be issued against named local understudies with defined succession dates.
The honest message to a sixteen-year-old in Buea, Lagos, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, or Kinshasa is not “stay in school no matter what.” The honest message is that the education system is being reformed too slowly, and that the gap between what is taught and what is needed is real — but opting out is still the worst available response.
The industries that will define African sovereignty in 2050 -energy, AI, biotech, advanced manufacturing, critical minerals processing, and defense, all speak the same technical language. The young person who takes linear algebra, chemistry, and engineering seriously, even inside a flawed curriculum, is positioning themselves for the operating roles that ownership alone cannot fill.
The resounding advice for African youth from Dangote is “don’t leave the continent” but the onus remains on the policymakers.