Socrate Safo Writes To President John Mahama
Your Excellency,
THE DEGREE TRAP AND WHY GHANA MUST CHOOSE TVET NOW
Ghana stands at a crossroads, and the choices we make today will determine the destiny of millions of our young people. One truth confronts us daily: our education system is producing more unemployed graduates than our economy can ever absorb. The beautiful dream of university education has become, for many families, a painful trap.
Parents often sacrifice everything, salaries, loans, and even their last dignity, to send their children to university. Yet after four years of lectures and theory-based learning, these young graduates return home with degrees but no jobs, certificates but no skills, and hope without opportunity. They become dependent not because they are lazy, but because our system failed to prepare them for the world of work.
This forces us to ask a national question: Why do we go to school?
Surely it is to earn a living, to stand on one’s own feet, and to build a meaningful future. Yet our universities continue to offer large volumes of humanities courses that convert vibrant young minds into job seekers in a country where jobs simply do not exist.
This crisis demands deliberate and transformational action.
THE CASE FOR A TVET-LED FUTURE
Your Excellency, if we truly want to solve youth unemployment, Ghana must reposition Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) as the foundation of our national development, not as a backup option.
TVET offers what the economy urgently needs. Practical hands-on skills, Employability, Entrepreneurial readiness,
Self-reliance, and Real-world competence
A TVET-trained young person does not wait to be hired.
He creates, innovates, and builds.
Nations that have transformed their economies, such as Germany, Singapore, South Korea, and China, did so by prioritising skills over paper qualifications. Ghana can do the same.
A FIVE-YEAR NATIONAL SHIFT
I humbly propose a bold but necessary policy direction:
- Temporarily restructure all universities to deliver strictly TVET and skills-based courses for the next five years.
We already have thousands of humanities graduates struggling to find jobs. This temporary shift would retool our entire youth base with practical, employable skills.
- Establish a National TVET Start-Up Fund.
Let students graduate with both skills and capital. This will enable them to set up workshops, digital businesses, production units, technical services, and more, instantly multiplying jobs across the economy.
- Make TVET certification a primary requirement for employment in both the public and private sectors.
Let skills become the true proof of education.
If Ghana commits to this direction, we will witness a rapid transformation of our workforce and our economy.
LEARNING FROM OUR PAST
Interestingly, this was the original intention behind the Junior Secondary School (JSS) system, to give children practical skills before they completed basic education. Unfortunately, the vision faded, and certificate chasing became the new national religion.
Now is the time to revive that intent on a national scale, and do it right.
THE FUTURE WE CAN BUILD
If our universities become skill factories rather than certificate factories, Ghana will quickly produce, Innovators.
Technicians. Creative artisans. Digital builders. Industrial workers, Problem solvers and Entrepreneurs
Instead of young graduates roaming the streets with CVs in hand and despair in their hearts.
This is not merely an education reform.
It is an economic revolution.
It is a national survival strategy.
It is the future our children deserve.
YOUR EXCELLENCY, LET US BE DELIBERATE
Ghana cannot continue on this path of theory-heavy, skill-light education. The world is powered by competence, not certificates. By skills, not status. By creativity, not credentials.
Your Excellency, I appeal to you, and to all policymakers, to lead a bold national shift toward TVET as the engine of Ghana’s development.
Let us be deliberate.
Let us be courageous.
Let us build a future where Ghanaian youth can create work, not chase it.
Respectfully,
Socrate Safo,
Patriotic Ghanaian.
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