The Last Apprentices
Listen to me.
Right now... as you read this... a seventy-year-old mechanic in Onitsha is closing his workshop. Forever.
He can fix any car engine by SOUND. Just listening. No computer diagnostics. No manual. Just forty years of grease under his fingernails and knowledge that lives nowhere else but in his hands.
Nobody learned from him.
Nobody.
The boys all want to be Yahoo Yahoo. Or relocate to Canada. Or become influencers. Nobody wants grease under their fingernails anymore.
This is happening EVERYWHERE.
In Ohio, an electrician retires next month. Sixty-three years old, hands like leather. He knows how transformers sing different songs before they fail. "You hear that hum change pitch," he says, "you got maybe six hours." He's been trying to hire an apprentice for three years. Nobody applies. The few who do want to skip straight to journeyman wages without touching a wire.
In Ghana, a master weaver died last year. Alone. His loom sits silent. The patterns that told stories in thread for centuries? Gone. Forever.
We had systems that worked. Beautiful systems. HUMAN systems.
In Yoruba culture, it was ìṣẹ́ ọ̀wọ́—literally "handwork." The Igbo apprenticeship system built entire economies—you serve a master for 5-7 years, he teaches you business, sets you up, you succeed, take your own apprentice. The cycle continues. For CENTURIES.
In the West, the word "apprentice" comes from Latin—"apprehendere." To grasp. To seize understanding with your actual hands. Germany still gets it—350 occupations, three and a half years, half in school, half working. They graduate with actual skills.
But everywhere else? Those systems are DEAD.
Investment banks have sharply reduced the number of entry level analysts they hire in recent times (Bloomberg, FT, Economic Times). Law firms automating document review (Reuters). Engineering companies replacing junior CAD work with AI. The bottom rungs of every ladder... gone. Sawed off. Algorithmed away.
You know what's truly insane? We're doing this at the exact moment we need those apprentices most.
Nigeria’s universities produced about 13,500 full-time engineering graduates in 2019. Add in polytechnics and technical colleges, and the number rises into the tens of thousands every year. Kenya registers a few thousand new graduate engineers annually, South Africa similar, Ghana lower but still significant. On paper, Africa is producing engineers at scale.
But you know how many of them actually touch a real machine during training? A fraction. We don't even track it properly—that's how much we care.
The rest? They graduate straight into unemployment. Or Uber driving. Or leaving. Always leaving. Thousands of Nigerian professionals, including engineers, leave every year for opportunities abroad.
And it’s not just Africa. America’s utility sector is sounding alarms too: the U.S. Department of Energy warned in 2020 of a looming retirement cliff, with 20–25% of the skilled utility workforce set to leave within five years. A quarter of the people who keep the lights on. Recent labor force data confirms this trend: workers aged 55 and over already represent 14–17% of the energy workforce in sectors like power generation, nuclear, and energy efficiency—figures that approach or exceed critical thresholds for knowledge transfer (the U.S. Energy and Employment Report 2024 (USEER), 2024, pp. 38–44)
These aren't jobs you can learn from YouTube. These are people who know which substation floods every March, which protection relay has that weird delay, which transformer was installed backwards in 1987 but somehow still works.
But the companies? The refineries need engineers—but want ten years experience. The mines need geologists—but only seniors. Job posting positions requiring "7+ years experience with large language models." Some wants "5+ years with GPT architecture."
The math doesn't work. GPT-3 launched in 2020.
They're not looking for candidates. They're looking for nobody. It's a filter. A way to say "we don't train humans anymore" without saying it.
I met this electrician in Nairobi last month. "You know what kills me?" he said. "Large African corporates hiring expatriates. EXPATRIATES. To do work I've been doing for twenty years. But they won't train our youth."
The expatriate? Makes $8,000 a month. The apprentice job they won't create? Would cost $500 a month.
THE MATH IS INSANE.
I talked to a bank that considered eliminating its analyst program this year 2025. "AI will do the modeling now," the MD told me. "More accurate, faster, cheaper." I asked who will check the AI's work. "The associates." The associates who used to be analysts? "Well... we will hire experienced associates now." From where? Long pause. "Other banks."
Every bank probably thinking the same thing. Every company. Every industry. Musical chairs with expertise. When the music stops...
MIT in 2024 published a study. Students who use AI for coding learn less than those who struggle through problems manually. But they produce code way faster. So guess which approach wins? The one that creates programmers who can't actually program. The one that looks efficient right up until nothing works and nobody knows why.
We're watching civilization's knowledge metabolism shut down in real time.
Agriculture tells the same story. Sixty percent of Africans work in farming. The average age of an American farmer? Fifty-eight. These people know which seeds work in which soil. When rains will come by watching ants. How to store grain without chemicals. Knowledge passed down for GENERATIONS.
Their children? In Nairobi. Lagos. New York. Silicon Valley. Working in call centers. Doing digital marketing. Serving coffee with computer science degrees.
Nobody wants to farm. Nobody's learning to farm. And in ten years... TEN YEARS... when those farmers are gone? We'll import food with money we don't have. From countries that kept their apprenticeships. While our soil sits empty.
The telecommunications boom? MTN. Safaricom. Airtel. They imported technicians. IMPORT. To fix towers in our own countries. Because we didn't train our people when the technology was new. Now they need experience we never created. So even today, decades later, companies continue to bring in expatriate expertise for advanced telecom projects.
Same with oil. Same with mining. Same with EVERYTHING.
Traditional knowledge is vanishing even faster. That old woman in your village who knows which leaves stop bleeding? Which roots help with childbirth? She's the last one. Her daughter is a nurse in London. Her granddaughter studies pharmacy in India. Nobody sat with her to learn. Nobody wanted "bush medicine."
But when pharma companies come... and they DO come... they want that knowledge. They'll patent it. Sell it back to us. Make billions. The knowledge we let die for free.
The Germans have a word... "Fingerspitzengefühl." Fingertip feeling. The intuition that comes from touching something ten thousand times. You can't download Fingerspitzengefühl. You can't prompt engineer it. It grows in your actual fingertips through actual contact with actual reality.
But we've decided reality is inefficient.
The Chinese understand this. You see those construction sites? Chinese companies everywhere? They bring their own welders. Their own electricians. Their own everything. Not because Africans or Americans can't do it. Because we stopped teaching our people to do it. They maintained master-apprentice relationships. We called them backwards and got MBAs instead.
Look how that worked out. LOOK.
South Africa can't find welders. America can't find electricians. The mines are DESPERATE. Utilities DESPERATE. Offering crazy money. But you need experience to get experience and nobody... NOBODY... gives first chances anymore.
Meanwhile? Youth unemployment at 60% in South Africa. 11% in America. Record highs everywhere.
Make it make sense. MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.
Go to any technical college. TVET. Community college. Whatever they call it now. Empty. Workshops with no students. Equipment rusting. Teachers teaching nobody. Because everyone thinks university is the answer. Everyone wants a degree. Nobody wants to learn to MAKE things.
We have more unemployed graduates than ever. And more work that needs doing than anywhere else. But the graduates can't do the work. And nobody's learning how.
NOBODY.
Here's where it gets dark.
Every senior engineer, every master craftsman, every experienced anything... they all learned the same way. By doing. By failing. By watching someone who knew. The partner at the law firm who spots the fatal flaw in a contract? She spent years reviewing thousands of boring documents. The power systems engineer who prevents cascading blackouts? He made mistakes on low-stakes projects until the patterns clicked.
That pipeline is gone. Severed. We're eating our civilizational seed corn and calling it efficiency.
The utility executive I interviewed put it perfectly: "We're about five years from finding out what happens when nobody knows how anything works."
Five years. That's 2030. That's tomorrow. That's a heartbeat in infrastructure time.
When the last mechanics who learned by touching engines retire... When the last farmers who know the soil die... When the last craftsmen close their workshops... What then?
WHAT THEN?
We'll have all the degrees in the world. All the certificates. All the conferences about development. All the AI assistants. But nobody who knows how to DO anything.
The last apprentices are in their forties now. They squeaked through before the doors closed. They're teaching nobody because nobody's there to teach. When they retire... and they will retire... we'll have machines that can simulate expertise and humans who never developed it.
That's not a civilization. That's a cargo cult. Going through the motions. Copying the forms. Missing the substance entirely.
And the really sick part? We're proud of it. We put it in quarterly reports. "Reduced headcount through AI implementation." "Improved efficiency by eliminating junior positions." "Streamlined operations by removing training costs."
What we really did was cut our own throat. Slowly. Efficiently. With machine learning precision.
Wake up.
This isn't tomorrow's problem. This is TODAY'S catastrophe. Right now, while you read this, another workshop closes. Another master retires without passing it on. Another piece of human knowledge dies.
We're not losing jobs. We're losing civilizational memory. We're losing the ability to BUILD. To MAKE. To FIX. To GROW.
And we're doing it to ourselves. Voluntarily. Proudly. Because apprenticeship isn't modern. Because working with your hands isn't prestigious. Because we forgot that every developed country got there by MAKING things. And the people who make things? They learned from someone. Who learned from someone. Who learned from someone.
Until we cut the chain.
And called it progress.
That mechanic in Onitsha? His workshop is a computer training center now. The computers don't work. Nobody knows how to fix them.
That electrician in Ohio? Position still open. Always will be.
The transformers keep humming their warning songs.
Soon, nobody will hear.