By Oluwatobiloba Gideon Oludayomi
This has been on my mind for a while now, especially with this Olodo conversation making the rounds everywhere. Everybody has an opinion. Everybody is pointing fingers. But I think we are missing the real point, and I want us to slow down and look at this thing properly.
Let me take you back. When I was in primary school, we had two books that shaped how we thought. One was called Verbal Reasoning. The other was Quantitative Reasoning. Those two books were not just subjects, they were training grounds. They were built to teach a child how to think, not just what to think. Quantitative Reasoning in particular taught you to see patterns, to solve problems with logic, to connect one number to another and arrive at a sensible conclusion. It was not about cramming. It was about reasoning.
Somewhere along the line, we lost that. And I do not think we lost it by accident. I think a system was built, quietly and gradually, that stopped producing thinkers and started producing certificate holders. There is a big difference between the two.
Now here is where I want us to pause and be honest with ourselves. This Olodo trend everyone is laughing about, calling people out for not knowing simple things, is that really about a lack of education? I do not think so. I have met men and women who never sat in a university lecture hall, some of them never even finished secondary school, and yet when you sit them down and talk business, talk life, talk strategy, they reason with a sharpness that will humble any first class graduate. Meanwhile, I have sat across the table from people with degrees stacked on degrees, and the moment life throws them a real problem, they freeze. They cannot connect two dots. They cannot reason from cause to effect. They can recite theories, but they cannot think.
So maybe the real Olodo is not the man who never went to school. Maybe the real Olodo is the system that gave people papers without giving them minds.
I never wanted to go to university. Something in me resisted it from the start. And when I eventually found myself there, my suspicion was confirmed. I saw a system that was doing more harm to the brain than good. A system built on memorization, not understanding. A system that rewards you for repeating what the lecturer said, not for thinking beyond what he said. That is not education. That is data entry into a human mind, and data entry does not build reasoning, it only builds storage.
Let us define education properly, because I think we have gotten the meaning twisted. To be educated is to be enlightened. To be educated is to be empowered. It is not about the certificate on your wall. It is about what your mind can now do that it could not do before. If a man finishes school and still cannot manage his money, still cannot think through a simple problem, still cannot reason his way out of a bad decision, then in what sense has he been educated. He has been informed, maybe. But he has not been transformed.
This is why I always say that most problems are not what they look like on the surface. What we call an Olodo crisis in Nigeria is really a reasoning crisis. It did not start today. It started the day we allowed our schools to trade thinking for cramming. It started the day we began to celebrate result slips over reasoning ability. The symptom is a young man who cannot calculate simple interest or reason through a basic scenario. But the root cause is a system that trained him to answer questions, not to understand problems.
The scripture has always spoken to this. Proverbs four, verse seven says, wisdom is supreme, so get wisdom. If you gain nothing else, get understanding. Notice it did not say get certificates. It said get wisdom and understanding. Solomon, the wisest man to ever live, did not ask God for more knowledge when given the chance to ask for anything. He asked for a discerning heart to understand and to reason rightly. That is what quantitative reasoning was supposed to build in us from childhood, a discerning mind, a mind that can reason with numbers, with logic, with patterns, and apply that same reasoning to life itself.
I have come to believe that reasoning is a skill, not a gift reserved for the educated few. It can be built. It can be trained. And it must be trained early, because a child who grows up solving logical puzzles, working with numbers, and reasoning through patterns will carry that same sharpness into adulthood, whether he becomes a trader, a farmer, a mechanic, or an accountant.
I grew up around numbers in a very different way from the classroom. Running businesses, managing a farm, negotiating deals, all of these forced me to reason quantitatively in real time. Nobody hands you a multiple choice question in the marketplace. Life gives you raw, unstructured problems, and you must reason your way through them. That is the real test. That is the real Olodo test, if we must use that word. Not what you can recite, but what you can reason through when nobody is holding your hand.
So what do we do from here. First, we must stop mocking people and start asking better questions. Instead of laughing at someone's ignorance, ask why an entire generation is struggling to reason. Instead of blaming individuals, examine the curriculum, the teaching methods, the values we have prioritized as a nation. Second, if you are a parent, do not wait for the school system to build your child's reasoning ability. Introduce them to puzzles, patterns, numbers, and logical games early. Teach them to ask why, not just what. Third, if you are an adult who feels behind, know that reasoning can still be developed. Read widely. Solve problems deliberately. Engage with people who think differently from you. The brain is not fixed, it grows with use.
Here is a line I want you to sit with. A man can pass every exam and still fail at life, because exams test memory, but life tests reasoning. Let that sink in.
I am not writing this to condemn anybody, whether educated or not. I am writing this to open our eyes to the real gap. Nigeria does not lack school leavers. Nigeria lacks reasoning. And until we address that root, we will keep mistaking symptoms for solutions, and we will keep calling each other names while the real problem sits quietly in our curriculum, our homes, and our value system.
I would love to hear from you. Did you grow up with those verbal and quantitative reasoning books too. Do you think our schools are still building thinkers, or just producing certificate holders. Drop your thoughts, I read every comment, and I am always ready to reason this through with you.
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Oluwatobiloba Gideon Oludayomi is a practical writer, a scripture addict, and a versatile entrepreneur building wealth through agriculture, real estate, and enterprise. He writes on faith, business systems, personal development, mindset re-engineering, and the Nigerian condition. He is the Convener of the Dominion Guild Network, an ecosystem of high value individuals, young and determined to becoming an empowered generation. He is also the author of "Build It to Last", "I Thought I Married a Wife" (a novel), and "Practical Love".
