What Onyedika and Boniface is doing for Onitsha is what Victor Osihmen is doing with big influencers in Lagos.
Once Onitsha catches up, it's all over. We no dey stop half way, and we don't do half measures.
We should be intentional about every Alaigbo city.
Onitsha will rise again!!!
There's Not Enough Reasons To Develop Nigeria
And i will explain why.
The Nigerian state was never designed to serve the Nigerian people, and the elites who run it have no incentive to fix it. This is largely because politics is not about ideology or public service. It's in fact, the most lucrative business in the country. The state operates as a vehicle to capture and distribute oil wealth.
The political class, across ethnic and regional lines, shares a unspoken agreement: protect the status quo so everyone can get their turn at the cake. If a politician builds good roads, reliable electricity, and world-class schools, they have less money to share around or store in foreign bank accounts. And because the government's money comes from oil wells and not the taxes of thriving businesses, the government does not actually need its citizens to be productive or wealthy to survive.
A country works when there is a basic deal: citizens pay taxes and obey laws, and the government provides security, infrastructure, and justice. In Nigeria, that contract is completely dead.
If you are a middle-class or wealthy Nigerian, you are a mini-state unto yourself. You drill your own borehole for water, buy your own generator for electricity, hire private security to stay alive, and pay out of pocket for private healthcare and schooling. And because the people with the education, money, and influence have successfully insulated themselves from the failure of the state, there is no sustained, existential pressure from the top or middle class to force a systemic reform. The poor are left to survive on miracles and hustle.
Someone would say, "but Nigerians are famous for their resilience and entrepreneurship." Well, there's is a dark side to this. It breeds wicked, selfish citizens, largely because the system is also brutal, which means survival requires an individualistic, hyper-competitive mindset.
When institutions fail, people stop relying on rules and start relying on connections ("connections"), bribes, and cutting corners. If you try to follow the rules strictly, the system crushes you. We normalise the abnormal. Instead of demanding functional public transportation, people adapt by waking up at 4:00 AM to sit in traffic. Instead of demanding a working national power system, they buy a bigger generator or nowadays, extra solar power storage batteries. The incredible capacity of Nigerians to adapt to suffering has inadvertently become a pressure-release valve for the government; the people adapt so well that the elites never have to fix the root cause.
We have also institutionalised extortion in public service, even the every institutions meant to protect and enforce order have been corrupted into predators. From the police officer at a checkpoint to the customs official at the port, the primary goal of many public offices is to extract money from citizens and businesses.
If a young entrepreneur builds a successful business, they are not rewarded with government support; they are targeted by regulatory agencies looking for bribes. This creates a massive ceiling on growth.
So in essence, Nigeria is not broken by accident. It is working exactly as it was designed to work for the few hundred thousand people at the top who profit from the chaos, while the energy, brilliance, and potential of 200 million plus people are burned as fuel to keep the broken machine running.
Unfortunately, many do not pay attention to this as they should.
The 500k analysis that I did excludes rents, utility bills, school fees, health, etc.
We are in a very precarious situation.
12 years of massive deterioration under the APC government.
I just realized a few months ago that, if not because of X revenues, I would have been struggling to save and pay bills alone, despite being amongst the 1% of top 9-5 earners in the country.
And I don't live a flamboyant lifestyle.
Just basic ways of living, which almost every legitimate human being should live.
Realky pathetic.
@Victorokeke_ Are there PG scholarship opportunities in South Korea?
If yes, can you point me to them.
Can you guide to people who wish to pursue further education in South Korea?
Chinua Achebe viewed the writer as an educator and reformer. At one time, he insisted that African writers cannot afford to be passive observers or luxury artists. Because of the ongoing struggles with leadership and inequality in the continent, he said a writer must actively use their craft to fight for human validity. 🙏🙏🙏
Nigerian universities must stop being certificate factories.
Every university should be judged by:
Research that solves national problems
Graduate employability
Industry partnerships
Student innovation
Integrity of exams
Quality of teaching
Startup creation
Patents and practical outputs.
A university that cannot solve one serious local problem in its host community should be ashamed.
Every Nigerian child must leave school with the ability to think, build, communicate, earn, and serve.
Education is the factory that produces politicians, lawyers, engineers, doctors, pharmacists, nurses, etc.
So if education is corrupt, the nation is finished.
No country becomes great with fake exams.
So the first national emergency is assessment integrity.
WAEC, NECO, GCE, JAMB, university exams, professional exams, all must become clean, technology-driven, traceable, and consequence-based.
Exam malpractice should not be treated as “normal Nigerian behaviour.”
It should be treated as economic sabotage.
Because every fake A produces a weak graduate, and every weak graduate weakens the nation.
This is what the Minister for education and all state commissioners for education should face head on and solve.
Cartesian logic is not indecision. It is the refusal to let assumptions pass as truth before they have faced interrogation.
The term comes from René Descartes’ method of disciplined doubt: do not accept a proposition simply because it is popular, inherited, emotionally satisfying, or institutionally convenient. Break the issue down, test assumptions, examine consequences, and proceed only with what can survive reasoned scrutiny.
In practical decision-making, it is often framed around four questions:
1. What happens if we do this?
2. What happens if we do not do this?
3. What will not happen if we do this?
4. What will not happen if we do not do this?
📌
There’s a silent disaster happening in Nigeria that nobody wants to confront honestly.
We keep shouting about unemployment, bad leadership, low productivity, corruption, poor healthcare, failed institutions and why our country is not working. But many people are avoiding the root cause.
Our education system has been deeply compromised.
A student enters secondary school or university full of dreams, intelligence and potential. Then the system teaches them something dangerous:
“You do not need competence to succeed.”
WAEC malpractice. NECO malpractice. GCE runs. Sorting. Sex for grades. Extortion. Intimidation. Victimization. Handout rackets. “See me after class.” “Talk to your lecturer.” “Settle this course.”
And after 4 or 5 years of surviving that environment, we expect excellence to magically appear.
It won’t.
A country cannot repeatedly reward dishonesty in classrooms and expect integrity in government offices, hospitals, engineering sites, courtrooms and businesses.
This is where many of our unemployable graduates are coming from.
Not because Nigerians are not intelligent.
Not because our youths are lazy.
But because too many people were trained inside a system where merit was murdered.
The painful part is this:
UNN, UNILAG, FUTO, ABU, UI, IMSU, ABSU and many others are using largely the same NUC-regulated curriculum.
The difference is standards.
The universities that still command respect are usually the ones with stronger resistance against sorting, extortion and academic fraud.
The ones collapsing in reputation are often the ones where corruption became normalized.
Once a student realizes they can buy an “A” with ₦20,000, or sleep their way through a course, or manipulate results through connections, the motivation to truly learn starts dying slowly.
And when millions of such graduates enter the labor market, the entire country pays the price.
That weak engineer may eventually supervise a bridge.
That poorly trained nurse may handle a patient.
That compromised accountant may manage public funds.
That fake first-class graduate may become a lecturer and reproduce the same cycle again.
This is no longer just an education problem.
It is a national security problem.
Countries become great because they protect competence fiercely.
Singapore did it.
China did it.
Germany did it.
South Korea did it.
You cannot build a first-world country with a third-world attitude towards education integrity.
Nigeria does not have a shortage of talent.
Nigeria has a shortage of systems that protect excellence.
And until we become ruthless about fighting academic corruption, exam malpractice, sorting, sex-for-grades and institutional intimidation, we will continue producing certificates instead of competence.
This fight is bigger than schools.
It is about the future survival of Nigeria itself.
A student enters university and quickly realizes that with ₦20,000, he can “sort” his way to an A.
Immediately, the hunger to study dies.
The desire to compete dies.
Curiosity dies.
Discipline dies.
Why spend sleepless nights reading when corruption can buy the same result?
After 4–5 years, that same student graduates with a certificate that says “excellent”, but with a mind that was never trained to solve problems, think critically or build anything valuable.
Then millions of such graduates flood the labour market every year and we keep shouting:
“There are no jobs.”
But the harder truth is this:
Many employers are no longer just looking for certificates. They are desperately looking for competence.
UNN, UNILAG, FUTO, ABSU and IMSU all use the same NUC-regulated curriculum.
The difference has never really been curriculum.
The difference is standards.
Where corruption becomes culture, excellence dies quietly.
And when excellence dies in universities, the entire country eventually pays for it.
This is no longer “school problems.”
This is a national emergency.
If we don’t fix corruption inside our education system, no political reform in Nigeria will ever truly work.