It is one of those moments that arrests you, that forces a pause and drags your eyes beneath the surface of uniforms, titles, and pay slips to ask what truly stratifies our roles, sorts humans into class, sustains worth, and forges the quiet architecture of identity. What determines our importance, dignity, survival, happiness, and the way we will labour and serve? Pierre Bourdieu called it _capital_ in its embodied form, the skills, habits, and cultivated aptitudes that mark us more than inheritance ever could.
People hardly notice it early because we are a species seduced by appearance over substance. Yet in the journey of life, there is one thing that stands out in defining us, our status, and our survival.
Talents tend to be what makes us who we are more than anything else, and they set the boundaries of our service.
It is talent that hands us a job to do, stamps us with an identity to bear, and erects the statue we inhabit as high or low. It is talent that makes us financially viable, deciding whether we return home to a feast or to hunger, whether the take-home pay lifts or lowers the head. As Becker’s human capital theory insists, the returns to skill and training often outpace returns to physical capital, and the World Bank’s 2019 report on the changing nature of work found that 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately work in job types that do not yet exist, jobs that will be seized only by those who nursed talent early. Those who realize this truth pay attention to nothing else like nursing, identifying, and building this talent.
I have come to see how it reshapes people into their real identity. Those who were barely known as children because they did not inherit status could become tomorrow’s giants, the ones girls fall over and boys chase. And those who inherited status, the so-called “ajebos,” could become tomorrow’s wayward if they never converted privilege into skill. Psychologist Angela Duckworth’s research on _grit_ shows why: sustained interest and effort toward talent predict achievement far more reliably than pedigree. Looking back, I realized that almost all those once treated as “ajabo kids” were eventually reshaped by the journey, sent back to the back seat, while the unknown, the child from the house built with mud, emerged more relevant, more dignified, more self-worthing, more prideful, able to employ, to give jobs, and to maintain a family. Amartya Sen’s capability approach reminds us that dignity flows not from what we own, but from what we are able to do and to be.
What makes the difference is the choice to pay attention to economic decisions, because nothing matters like talents, skills, and ideas that bring money and put food on the table as a form of investment that must always exist. It reminds me of a debate that once surfaced about the native local language, the so-called mother tongue, versus our lingua franca, and which a child should learn first.
From that debate I learned that although mother tongue comes with emotional connection and symbolism that could also open doors unexpectedly, its economic place in creating national or international prominence through communication skills, wide-reach content, influence, opportunities, and employability could be compromised without strict balance. Scholars like Ajayi and Adegbija have long argued that linguistic capital, when paired with global languages, becomes a multiplier for talent rather than a cage for it.
Today I reflect on the man and woman who leave their families behind for months in remote villages and towns to work, in chase of what to eat and survival. Today it comes to mind, the daily struggle people make on the roads, in the jungle to confront criminals, the risk undertaken at workplace to treat others that sometimes leads to the tragedy of acquiring infectious disease like Lassa fever and other casualties in the service of man and nation. I look back to see how the dignity of labour reshapes many physically and mentally to appear completely different from their natural look such as sportsmen, boxers, wrestlers, both for passion, dignity, and relevance. Sociologist Richard Sennett calls this the craftsman’s ethic, where the hand and the mind are educated together, and identity is earned through the discipline of work.
It’s Workers’ Day! It is a day that requires not only celebrating the physical body but, more significantly, the internal resources of talent that make the different roles, work, status, and service possible for survival, happiness, wellbeing, honour, and returns. Without talent, there won’t be workers or different classes of workers in both formal and informal sectors.
The OECD’s Skills Outlook repeatedly confirms that cognitive, social, and manual skills are the true engine of productivity gaps between nations and individuals. It is talent that makes everyone outlive time and creates identity, titles, and the status of being perceived low or high. It is what gives work and keeps family every day. It creates kings that reign long and those made to serve rulers, even when born with a silver spoon. For as the philosopher Alain de Botton warns, without status built on merit and usefulness, we suffer the anxiety of being unseen.
Long live, Nigerian workers.
Long live, Nigeria.
Happy Workers’ Day.
Bagudu can be reached via bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com or 07034943575.
