Imagine this, dear friend,

It’s 2:00 PM on a Tuesday in Lagos. You are sitting across from a client.  The generator is humming in the background. The client has just finished pouring out a chaotic, heartbreaking story about their marriage, their trauma, or their failing career.

They stop talking. They look at you.  And then they ask the question that haunts every Nigerian psychologist: "So... how do I fix this?"

In that split second, your heart rate spikes. Your brain frantically scans through every textbook you read in university. 

You remember the definition of Cognitive Dissonance. You remember the history of Freud. You remember the statistics from your final year project. But you realise, with a sinking feeling in your stomach, that none of that helps you right now.

You know what the problem is called. But you do not know what to do. So, you default to the generic. You say things like, "Have you tried breathing exercises?" or "You need to set boundaries," or "It will take time."

The client nods, but the light leaves their eyes. They know you are stalling. You know you are stalling. This is not a story about a "bad" psychologist. This is the story of us.

There is a quiet tragedy unfolding across Nigeria's psychological landscape, so quiet that most people mistake it for progress.

Every year, thousands of students enter psychology programmes. They read the textbooks. They memorise the definitions. They sit for the exams. They leave with certificates that announce, in confident serif fonts, “Bachelor of Science in Psychology.” 

Some go on to obtain postgraduate degrees, stacking credentials like an academic armour. And yet, in clinics, classrooms, industries, research labs, courts, NGOs, consulting firms, and policy rooms across the country, something peculiar keeps surfacing: 

The literacy is increasing. The competence is not.

It is one of the great paradoxes of our field: Nigerians are becoming psychologically literate, but not psychologically skilled. And if we are honest, this is not a Nigerian problem; psychology as a discipline has always had this tension. Ours is simply its most amplified form.

Soon, this gap will define the entire identity of the Nigerian psychologist more than any policy, curriculum reform, or professional registration process. The question is no longer, “What do you know?” The question is, “What can you do with what you know... and does it even work?”

The Seduction of Knowing

There is a certain comfort in knowing things. Definitions are tidy. Theories are dignified. Models are orderly. Learning them feels like progress... and, okay, it kinda is. It is the first step. But the danger is how easily knowing masquerades as ability.

A student reads about cognitive biases and suddenly thinks they understand human decision-making. A graduate learns Freud’s stages and believes they can interpret behaviour. A professional takes a weekend course in trauma and begins offering therapy. The literacy is there; the competence has ghosted.

Psychology’s has this sneaky weakness: it looks deceptively simple from a distance.

People think insight equals skill. But insight is not intervention. Understanding is not execution. A checklist is not a formulation. A theory is not a treatment plan. A model is not a method. If medicine operated this way, people would die. In psychology, people simply suffer silently.

The Nigerian psychological system, unintentionally, rewards literacy because literacy is easier to measure. Exams. GPAs. Presentations. Long essays. Final year projects typed in Times New Roman, supervised by lecturers who are already stretched thin.

Competence, on the other hand, is inconvenient. 

It requires supervision, feedback cycles, error correction, guided immersion, and thousands of hours of structured practice. Competence is slow. Competence is relational. Competence is expensive to build. So naturally, competence is rare.

Why Competence Feels Almost “Foreign”

Competence requires ecosystems. In countries where psychological competence thrives, they usually have:

1. Protected professional practice

2. ⁠Clear, enforced standards of training

3. ⁠A culture of supervision and mentorship

4. ⁠Accessible research infrastructure

5. ⁠Broad societal demand for psychological expertise

Nigeria currently has fragments of these conditions, but not cohesively or at scale. Our systems are still learning to value evidence over charisma. Our universities are still trying to modernise their models. Our internship structures struggle with quality assurance. Our public institutions rarely integrate psychological research into decision-making. Our private sector wants psychological skills, but cannot yet identify who truly possesses them.

The result is predictable: a nation filled with people who are psychologically interested but have never been shaped into psychologically effective ones.

There is intelligence in our students. Our young professionals are brilliant. There is depth in our professors. There are pockets of excellence everywhere. What is missing is a dependable forge; something that melts, shapes, tempers, and sharpens. A system that says: “Knowing is not enough. Come and become.”

Competence is Behavioural, not Intellectual

One of psychology’s most important truths is deceptively simple: Competence is a behaviour.

Competence is not what you know. Competence is what you do.

Competence is practising the skill, over and over, until it becomes part of you. Competence is what you do when no one is watching and when the stakes are real.

A competent therapist doesn’t quote manuals. They sit with someone in grief, shame, fear… and know exactly what to do next.

A competent researcher doesn’t just crunch numbers. They design studies that actually work in Nigerian reality, not some imported textbook fantasy.

A competent organisational psychologist doesn’t just know the Big Five. They read the room, diagnose a failing culture, and actually fix it without getting lost in corporate jargon.

Competence is behavioural precision built over time. Literacy is simply the starting point, dear friend.

The Psychological Cost of Literacy Without Competence

The literacy–competence gap produces three dangerous psychological syndromes in Nigerian psychology:

(a) Inflated Confidence Syndrome: People assume they can do more than they actually can. Dunning-Kruger meets survival pressure. “If the system won't train you, you'll convince yourself that you are trained.”

(b) Chronic Professional Imposter Syndrome: The few who can sense the difference between what they know and what they can do begin to feel like fraud. Not because they lack ability, but because the system hides the map of competence.

(c) Community-Wide Skill Diffusion: When no one is trained the same way, no one can guarantee quality. A discipline without shared standards becomes a discipline without shared identity.

This reality is where the Nigerian psychologist stands: intelligent, under-forged, internally conflicted, and yearning for an identity rooted in skill rather than vocabulary.

So, What Then is the Path Forward?

Every profession grows when it confronts itself. The solution isn't slogans, rebranding, social media clout, or copying foreign models. The solution is a return to the fundamentals: Skill. Fidelity. Mastery. Evidence. Mentorship. Practice. Correction. Research. Ethical clarity. Intergenerational exchange. The maturation of Nigerian psychology will depend on creating ecosystems where competence is not an accident but an expectation.

Competence is not glamorous. It is not immediately visible on Instagram. It is not as exciting as jargon. But it is the only thing that will make our field respected.

The Identity of the Nigerian Psychologist

Strip away the noise: Can you do what you claim to know? Not conceptually or theoretically, but practically?

Can you sit with someone and help them, right here, right now?

Can you enter a school and transform its behavioural dynamics?

Can you design a behavioural health intervention that works in Mushin, not Manhattan?

Can you supervise someone without replicating the trauma-based educational culture you inherited?

Can you read a research article and produce your own?

Can you lead a psychological team without hiding behind jargon?

Can you operate across cultural realities without collapsing into imported frameworks?

That is the currency: ability, not literacy. Competence requires a forge. Not a workshop. Not a webinar.

A forge. The kind that melts, reshapes, sharpens, and refines. The kind that equalises everyone who enters: undergraduates, postgraduates, allied professionals, and even senior experts, under one uncompromising principle:

You rise to the level of your training, not your interest.

But this article is not about programmes. It is about the idea that made such programmes necessary. The future of psychology in Nigeria will not be written by the well-read. It will be written by the well-formed.

Choose one psychological skill you believe you possess. Strip away the title, the certificate, the theory, the vocabulary. Then ask yourself: How do I know I am truly competent, and who trained me well enough to verify it? If your answer is uncertain, incomplete, or dependent on self-perception rather than structured evaluation, then that's good. You are precisely the kind of psychologist who will redefine this field. Competence begins with honesty.

Welcome to the forge, dear friend.