“When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.” — African Proverb
Across Nigeria and much of Africa, the refrain is familiar: “Our graduates are not employable.” Employers say it with frustration; universities respond with defensiveness; governments promise reform. Yet year after year, the gap widens between the skills the economy demands and those our young people possess.
As we look into 2026, this is no longer just an educational challenge — it is an economic one. The proverb reminds us that weakness within exposes us to defeat from without. If our talent pipelines are broken, no amount of foreign investment, digital innovation, or policy reform can make us globally competitive.
The new employability crisis
The International Labour Organisation estimates that over 60 percent of Africa’s unemployed are youth, even as employers struggle to fill technical and service roles. In Nigeria, the National Bureau of Statistics reports that youth unemployment and underemployment remain persistently above 40 percent, despite millions of young people graduating each year.
This paradox, of abundant labour and scarce skills, reveals a deeper problem: our education-to-work transition is outdated. Many graduates are trained for jobs that no longer exist, while employers increasingly seek skills that universities do not teach: digital literacy, communication, teamwork, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence.
The result is a workplace mismatch that hurts both sides. Employers spend heavily retraining new hires, while graduates face prolonged job searches and discouragement.
Why a new compact is needed
The first employability compact, the informal understanding that universities would produce graduates and employers would absorb them, has collapsed. The world of 2026 requires a second compact: one built on partnership, not blame.
The Employability Compact 2.0 means that educators, employers, and policymakers must deliberately co-create the workforce of the future. It demands shared responsibility:
Universities must embed practical learning, internships, and problem-solving projects into curricula.
Employers must open their doors to mentorship, apprenticeships, and industry-led certification.
The government must incentivise collaboration through tax reliefs, training funds, and accreditation reforms that reward relevance, not just compliance.
“In Nigeria, initiatives like the Industrial Training Fund’s Skills Development Programme and the National Youth Service Corps’ new digital-skills partnerships point in the right direction but remain too small to match the scale of the problem.”
Countries such as Kenya and Rwanda are already experimenting with this model — connecting university faculties with private-sector hubs to design short, industry-backed courses. In Nigeria, initiatives like the Industrial Training Fund’s Skills Development Programme and the National Youth Service Corps’ new digital-skills partnerships point in the right direction but remain too small to match the scale of the problem.
What 2026 demands
By 2026, every organisation that intends to grow must take talent development as seriously as finance. For employers, this means shifting from “ready-made recruitment” to co-created employability. Three priorities stand out:
Build learning ecosystems: Create alliances between firms, training institutions, and industry associations to share curricula, internships, and certification standards.
Invest in soft skills: Automation will handle routine work; human advantage will come from creativity, empathy, and problem-solving.
Measure outcomes: Instead of counting the number of trainees, track how many find jobs, keep them, and grow within them.
Forward-looking organisations like Access Bank, Interswitch, and MTN Nigeria already run structured graduate and internship programmes that blend classroom and field exposure — practical evidence that employability can be engineered when employers and educators work as one.
The internal frontier
The proverb teaches that vulnerability begins within. When we fail to develop our people, we invite external threats: talent flight, reliance on expatriates, and low productivity. Strengthening the “enemy within” means confronting our reluctance to invest in human capital and our habit of treating training as a cost instead of capital formation.
For Nigeria’s small and medium enterprises, this is especially critical. SMEs employ more than 80 percent of the workforce but often lack structured training systems. Collective initiatives, shared academies, sectoral training funds, and digital learning pools, can close that gap without crippling costs.
A call to action
If we strengthen our talent pipelines, external competitiveness will follow naturally. 2026 will reward countries and companies that view employability as national infrastructure — just as vital as power, roads, or broadband.
The new compact must therefore rest on three pillars: relevance, resilience, and responsibility. Relevance aligns education with market needs. Resilience keeps learning continuous. Responsibility ensures that no young person is left unprepared for the future of work.
The battle for economic transformation will not be won abroad; it will be won in classrooms, factories, and offices that teach, train, and trust the next generation. As the proverb says, when there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.
Our real defence for 2026 is not policy rhetoric or investment inflows — it is a workforce so capable, confident, and prepared that the world competes to hire from us.
Dr. Olufemi Ogunlowo is the CEO of Strategic Outsourcing Limited, a leading provider of personnel and business process outsourcing services in Nigeria. He is also a regular columnist on employment and workforce strategy.
