By Kolawole Eniola Israel
I recently had one of the most questioning days of my life. I was on public transport heading to school when the driver suddenly struck up a conversation about his time in the university. my university, in fact. He claimed to have graduated with a second-class upper. Now, he drives a bus for a living.
Something in me broke. I was hurt, confused. I began to wonder what my own future would hold after graduation. Maybe he lied about his grade, maybe he didn’t. But the fear he planted stayed with me.
I walked into my ENG 405 class, The Language of African Literature in English, still lost in thought. During a heated discussion on what constitutes African reality, a student boldly claimed that poverty is “just a phase” and not a true reality. I was fuming. Most of us would leave that lecture hall to trek home, eating imagination and assignments for dinner. And someone in that same classroom dared to write off the pain of the majority perhaps because it didn’t speak to him at the moment?
Before you dismiss me, Malcolm X once said:
“Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor.”
If the pain of the majority can be erased because a minority feels unaffected, then truth itself is being oppressed.
My uncle and even my pastor often speak of a different Nigeria. In the early 1970s, they say jobs waited for graduates even before final exams. Some were gifted cars. Others traveled abroad for further studies, fully funded by the government. What happened? How did we go from jobs waiting for graduates to graduates waiting on POS machines for customers?
The education system Is a shadow of itself. Lecturers strike just to get paid. Classrooms meant for 80 students now choke with over 200. In 2024, the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics reported that 9% of graduates are unemployed, a figure that doesn’t even capture the underemployed, the ones selling recharge cards with degrees in engineering.
How did a country that once called itself the “Giant of Africa” become one where most citizens can’t afford a decent meal?
From slavery, to segregation, to colonization, Black people have always fought systems meant to break them. Nigeria, a Black-led nation, was supposed to be different. Instead, it became the very system it once sought to destroy. We went from the white man’s whip to the failed promises of our own leaders circling back to the very misery we tried to escape, only this time, it’s worse.
Tuition fees are rising while minimum wage crawls behind at ₦70,000, Permit me to mention that not even all employers adhere to this new adjustment. Parents juggle rent, food, and bills. The dropout rate climbs quietly. The number of jobless graduates? No one even bothers to count anymore.
We were once oppressed by outsiders. Now, we oppress ourselves.
So I ask again What then is the hope of a Nigerian student?
Kolawole Eniola Israel
