In my previous article, The Olodo Uprising: What Nigeria’s Social Media Wars Reveal About Our Broken Definition of Intelligence, I argued that Nigeria has created a dangerous culture where intelligence is measured almost exclusively by educational qualifications.
The conversations that followed confirmed something I had long suspected: we have become so obsessed with certificates that we rarely stop to ask whether those certificates are actually producing competence.
But if that article questioned our definition of intelligence, this one asks an even more important question.
How do we actually build intelligent, productive people?
Because if our only answer continues to be “go to university,” then perhaps Nigeria has been asking the wrong question for decades.
