By Adeyinka John
Over the last ten or so years, I have interviewed more domestic staff than I can count. This year I interviewed the most I ever have in a single year. And somewhere in that process, I noticed something.
Something was eroding. Year in, year out.
Ten years ago, when I interviewed candidates for domestic roles, a good number could hold a conversation, read a little, write a little. This year, the proportion who could not read or write or even speak English at all, not fall short of the nine years of Universal Basic Education, but simply read, write or speak, was the highest I have ever seen.
At first I wondered if it was migration. Where I live, every January brings young people from the rural areas into the city looking for exactly this kind of work. I wondered whether they were also leaving the country under the Japa syndrome, whether the pool had thinned. But the numbers arriving did not seem to have fallen. The young people were still coming. They were simply arriving less equipped than the ones who came before them.
This post is not about domestic staff. They are not the story. They are the messenger. And the same signal shows up in the growing difficulty of holding a conversation in English with every day traders, artisans and service providers.
What I was seeing around me is what the national data has been saying out loud, but which may have felt more distant until now.
Nigeria has an estimated 18.3 million out-of-school children, the highest number of any country on earth, a distinction it has held for close to a decade, with the number climbing rather than falling over that time. Roughly one in five of the world’s out-of-school children is Nigerian (Source: UNICEF). And when you look at literacy by geography, the picture sharpens: Nigeria’s 2024 official household survey puts urban literacy at around 78 percent, but rural literacy at just 54 percent.
The people migrating into the cities to work are coming from precisely the places the education system has failed most.
So the trend I felt across a decade of interviews is not a feeling. It is a leading indicator.
And the lagging effect should trouble every one of us who talks about Nigeria’s future, because of what it says about how we are forming, and failing to form, our people, and the consequences of that. Our most educated young people increasingly leave through the front door in search of opportunity abroad and they excel there. That is one loss (for the country, not for them). But there is a quieter one on the other extreme.
A generation is reaching working age never having been given the foundation to become skilled at all. I am not suggesting the young people arriving in our cities exist to replace those who left. They deserve their own futures, on their own terms. My point is harder than that. With the right foundation, they could have been part of the answer to the very gaps we now lament. Instead, too many arrive unequipped to seize even the basic opportunities already in front of them.
This was heavy on my mind last month when I was privileged to attend the commemoration of World Youth Skills Day at the UN House in Abuja. The conversations were rich, full of talk about opportunity, innovation, closing the skills gap and acquiring the skills of the future.
But I kept returning to one uncomfortable question.
How do we bridge a skills gap when the foundation beneath it, basic literacy, is itself eroding, and the gap widening across geographies within the same federation? We cannot build entrepreneurial, innovative, future-ready youth on top of adults who were never taught to read, or only on a segment of the population.
So I offer three thoughts, not as final answers, but as where I believe serious attention belongs.
First, we must treat foundational literacy as national infrastructure, not charity. Roads, power and broadband get called infrastructure and get budgets to match. The ability to read is as foundational to productivity and growth as any of them are, because every other skill is built on it. It deserves the same seriousness, the same measurement, and the same accountability.
And beyond foundational literacy, the quality of education across the board matters as much as access and funding do.
Second, the gap is not in our policies. It is in our execution of them. I spend my working life on strategy, execution and policy, helping leaders and institutions turn ambition into measurable results. So I will not pretend the problem here is a shortage of good intentions or good policy documents. It rarely is. Nigeria does not lack education policies. What is routinely missing is the institutional discipline to deliver them: clear ownership, real accountability, measurement that tracks outcomes rather than activities, and consequences when results do not come. Strengthening the institutions responsible for execution is not a glamorous reform. It is the reform.
And the forces working against disciplined execution are hydra-headed: cut off one head and two grow back. The task is not to hack away faster, but to identify and sever the source of regeneration itself.
Third, employers and institutions cannot simply wait for the system to fix itself. We can choose to see the people in front of us not as inadequate labour, but as adults who were failed and can still be equipped. Workplace literacy, structured mentorship, technical and non-technical upskilling are not acts of generosity. They are acts of nation-building, and they protect the productivity of our own organisations.
Finally, we must connect the two conversations we keep having separately.
We discuss japa in one room and out-of-school children in another. They are the same conversation: how a nation forms, keeps and deploys its human capital. A country that loses talent at the top and fails to form it at the bottom is squeezing itself from both ends. The policy response has to hold both truths at once.
None of this is despair. It is precisely because I work with leaders and institutions on turning intention into results that I remain convinced the gap between where we are and where we could be is an execution gap,
…and execution gaps can be closed with true and concerted will.
The giant of Africa cannot rise on a foundation it is failing to lay.
What have you observed in your own work that the data had already foretold?
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