It’s Time We Stopped Punishing Skill: HND Deserves Equal Respect -By Nanna Gift Nimkur

In a workshop in Nnewi, a young man with an HND in Mechanical Engineering is rebuilding a 40-ton generator that powers an entire estate. In a bank in Lagos, a BSc holder with no internship is being trained for 3 months to use Excel. Tell me, which one did Nigeria need more urgently this morning? The answer reveals the lie we have lived with for 40 years: that a Degree is superior and an HND is second class.

The HND was never meant to be a “lesser” certificate. It was created to build the Nigeria we promised ourselves. Roads, factories, hospitals, power plants. Polytechnics were designed to produce doers, not just thinkers. Two years of theory, one year of SIWES, one year of intensive practice. That is not a shortcut. That is a different route to the same destination: national development. Yet our civil service still insists that the person who can fix the generator must enter one grade level below the person who wrote about it.

This bias costs us money. Billions. Because we graduate thousands of theorists every year and then spend more billions retraining them to be useful. Meanwhile, HND graduates who can weld, code, survey, and design are told to “go and do PGD” before they can be called officers. So they leave. They take their skills to Dubai, to Canada, to private firms that do not ask for grade level. We are exporting the exact manpower we created polytechnics to keep.

The world has moved on. Germany does not ask if you have a university degree to build a BMW. It asks if you can build it. India’s IT boom was powered by polytechnic and diploma holders. In 2026, with AI and automation eating white-collar jobs, the most secure careers in Nigeria will be technical. Solar installation, mechatronics, data center maintenance, agro-processing. All of them live in the HND space. If we keep looking down on that space, we will keep importing technicians to fix what our own people were trained to fix.

Let’s be honest about the origin of the stigma. It is class, not competence. Degree came with big grammar and big offices. HND came with overalls and workshop dust. But Nigeria is no longer a country that can afford vanity. We need water. We need light. We need food processing. You do not get those from memorizing textbooks. You get them from hands that have been trained to work.

The Federal Government has started the right conversation by removing the dichotomy in some ministries. But policy on paper is not enough. We must do three things now. First, equal pay for equal work in public service. Second, fund polytechnics like we fund universities. Modern labs, not 1980s equipment. Third, let HND holders proceed directly to Masters without the PGD toll gate. Let merit, not route, determine how far you go.

Nigeria’s future will not be built in senate chambers alone. It will be built in workshops, on construction sites, in tech hubs. That is HND territory. If we truly want Made in Nigeria to mean something, then we must stop punishing skill. Scrap the dichotomy. Pay for output. Respect the certificate that builds the country. Because the generator does not care what grade level you are. It only cares if you can fix it.