Technology entrepreneur and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Gemsbok Group, Charles Awuzie, has compared Nigerian youths and graduates with artificial intelligence (AI), emphasising that most youths in the country are as intelligent as AI, but are unfortunately jobless and underemployed because they are more interested in intelligently answering questions, acquiring certificates, and pretending to be rich.
The Nigerian South African-based technology entrepreneur said this in a recent KaaTruths podcast by Kel Armstrong Amobi titled ‘How tech, religion, and politics are controlling you’.
Awuzie said that the main reasons many youths and graduates are jobless and blame the government for their situation are rooted in the education and cultural systems of Nigerian society, which encourage students to answer questions intelligently but discourage them from asking intelligent questions.
The Gemsbok Group boss stated that intelligently answering questions does not make one intelligent. In light of this, he added that Nigeria needs to reset its educational system from a system that asks questions to students who must answer those questions correctly, to be seen as intelligent, to a system where the students, or the diligence of the students, should be tested by the strength of the questions they ask, not the answers they provide.
“Intelligence is being redefined. AI can answer questions. If humans can answer questions, too, what is the big deal? So, the intelligent agent or human must no longer be one who supplies the right answers, but one who can ask the right and intelligent questions,” he said.
“I tell people this, and you can go and verify, at the time I completed my senior secondary education, I was ready for life. I did not need a university education. I could build things at that point. I was already in tech, creating websites.
“My dad wanted me to be a university graduate because he is an educationist. So, I applied for Biochemistry at Abia State University. I was number six on merit. I told my dad, I am doing this for him, because I already knew who I am and what I wanted to become.
“But, today, people want to be graduates. However, behind that desire, there is no vision. So, behind the failed or failing educational system is a culture of success at all costs, graduate at all costs, doctor at all costs, engineer at all costs, and the list continues,” he lamented.
He stated that the problem is the culture of becoming successful at all costs, of becoming a graduate at all costs, not minding how one becomes a graduate.
Awuzie stressed that this old trend needs to be rethought or discarded, adding that one does not need to be any of these to be successful.
“We need an educational system that promotes innovation, one that does not promote cramming to pass the examinations. This is why the world is leaving us behind, because we now have artificial intelligence that can answer the questions that have been asked in exam halls,” he said.
Buttressing what Awuzie said, KaaTruths founder, Kel Armstrong Amobi, lamented that many Nigerians will hardly think about it this way — that asking intelligent questions is a sign of intelligence.
