A Nation Unlearning How to Think: The Tragic Comedy of Removing Mathematics from the Humanities

I became heartbroken when the news published in the attached photo got to me yesterday.

I wept. Yes, I wept. I discussed the consequences with my wife, and she, too, felt betrayed by the system.

It appears that Nigeria’s Ministry of Education and its ever-somnolent twin, the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council (NERDC), have decided that thinking is too much work for the Nigerian child.

In a move that deserves a place in the Museum of National Folly, they have announced that students seeking admission into the Arts and Humanities will no longer need Mathematics. Yes, you heard that right the subject that trains the brain to reason, analyse, and innovate has just been declared optional by people who have clearly never used theirs.

One wonders what level of intellectual paralysis must afflict a nation before it begins to amputate its own brain in the name of “educational reform.”

That’s exactly what this decision is cataclysmic, a national brain amputation disguised as educational reform.

Mathematics is not just about numbers; it is the discipline of disciplined thinking. It is the art of structure, the poetry of logic, the architecture of reason. It builds the mental muscles that make invention possible, the same muscles that question assumptions, test hypotheses, and imagine alternatives. In other words, it is the foundation of all innovations.

By removing Mathematics from the criteria for admission into the Arts and Humanities, the Ministry of Education has handed an escape route to every student who struggles with the subject, not because Mathematics is useless or difficult, but because it was poorly taught. Now, instead of fixing the broken method of teaching, we’ve chosen the lazy option: eliminating the subject altogether.

Knowing the importance of Mathematics and the cause of students’ poor performance in the subject, someone somewhere thought: “You know what’s making our student lose admission and become useless even after graduation? Too much Mathematics.”

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

And please note: this is happening in a country that has failed to invent even a decent traffic light or design its own pencil, where two supposed influencers(VDM and BLord) recently advertised how ignorant of international or business laws they are.

Let us call this decision what it truly is a national endorsement of mediocrity. It is a policy written in the ink of ignorance and signed with the pen of laziness. Because what the framers of this calamity have essentially declared is that Nigeria no longer needs thinkers only talkers, only debaters, only philosophers who can neither measure the consequences of their concepts/ideas nor manage the consequences when they eventually stare us in the face.

This decision is not about making education accessible; it’s about making stupidity comfortable.

For a nation crawling on its knees in every index of development, the least we can do is train our citizens to think critically. Mathematics does that it forces precision in thought, teaches order in chaos, and cultivates the habit of finding patterns where others see confusion. It teaches specializing, characterizing, generalizing, classifying, critiquing, improving, conjecturing, and convincing all the intellectual tools necessary for real transformation.

Remove Mathematics, and what you have left is the perfect Nigerian graduate, fluent in excuses, allergic to logic, and perpetually dependent on someone else’s innovation.

Let’s be honest: no society ever became great by making thinking optional. The Greeks didn’t build philosophy without logic. The Renaissance didn’t blossom on vibes. Even poetry itself, that crown jewel of the humanities, thrives on structure, rhythm, and proportion. Remove Mathematics, and you remove the rhythm from reason.

If the architects of this educational tragedy truly possess the degrees they flaunt, then one must question what their certificates were printed on paper, or pure embarrassment. Because this decision betrays not only a lack of mathematical literacy, but also a lack of historical, cultural, and developmental sense.

Nigeria doesn’t need fewer thinkers; it needs thinkers who can calculate consequences.

To those presiding over this circus Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council Sheda Nigerian Senate President Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu: your duty was to reform education, not to euthanize it. We are not asking you to make life easy for students; we are asking you to make life meaningful for the nation. And that begins with teaching people to think in numbers, in logic, in life.

If the Ministry of Education had done its homework, it would know that Kenya’s 2022 educational reforms emphasized mathematical and digital literacy across all disciplines, including the arts, because they understood that innovation is born where logic meets imagination. But here we are, inventing new ways to be backward.

When a nation starts running from Mathematics, it is no longer running from difficulty it is running from development.

And soon, when the lights go out (again), when the bridges collapse, when the economy shrinks, and when the next generation of “humanities scholars” cannot even balance the application of their concepts/ideas/imaginations to the needs of reality or interpret statistical evidence to support their claims, perhaps someone will remember that the first step toward failure was removing Mathematics from the equation.

Until then, may God have mercy on a country that keeps producing graduates who can write essays about development but can’t calculate its cost and Engineers/Ministers who get irritated when questioned to account for public funds at their disposal.