On December 17, President Buhari addressed the 344 schoolboys of Government Boys Science Secondary School, Kankara, who were freed by their abductors after six days in captivity. The president, in his words of encouragement, admonished the traumatised children about the futility of historical studies, compared to their chosen field of science. According to him, science is the bedrock of civilisational progress, stressing that those who study History and English language have no prospects in the job market. Such derisive commentary, on the professional value of History, is tragic and scary, to say the least. At a time when the teaching of History is being restored in our primary and secondary schools, following decades of moratorium, such dispiriting commentary by the number one citizen of the country could have disastrous consequences on the minds of aspiring historians. History was kind to President Buhari in his GCE result, for he earned a distinction in the subject. Similarly, the strength of his presidential campaigns was entirely predicated on the history of his personal integrity and honesty. Unfortunately, the president is unkind to history today in all ramifications. However, the problem is that there is no guarantee that history would be kind to him when he leaves office in 2023. The president’s vote of no confidence in History has ignited a panic regarding the job prospects of historians. Nevertheless, I am writing this piece neither in defence of history nor to edify the president on the values of History. Historians do not require any presidential validation to be taken seriously in a sane country. My interest in commenting on Buhari’s verdict on historical studies is borne out of the social responsibility of historians to assuage the fears of concerned history students, who are constantly haunted by the spectre of ahistoricism. Whether we like it or not, we cannot escape from history because our lives are governed by what happened in the past. History, in the words of Peter Furtado, “is in the air we breathe, in the cities we inhabit and in the landscape we roam”. Ever since the birth of history as an intellectual pursuit in the classical Greco-Roman tradition, the discipline has encountered and endured manifold epistemological and social challenges. It has survived the naturalism of the scientific revolution, the cultural arrogance of the Enlightenment period, the nihilism of postmodernism and the bellicosities of neo-liberal ahistoricism. President Buhari’s pessimism about History is thus a familiar rhetoric, which represents a crude version of the neo-liberal assault on the discipline. In neo-liberal thinking, the value of knowledge is measured in terms of tangible deliverables. This is the governing philosophy of capitalist consumerism. With the ascendancy of science and technology as the only reliable ventures that could guarantee material prosperity, History and other associated disciplines are treated as “endangered species”. We are seeing a growing trend towards “deregulation of cultural production”, in which disciplines in the humanities, hitherto seen as the cornerstone of national values and citizenship education, are neglected in favour of applied sciences. In postcolonial Nigeria, History, which should serve as the moral compass of the nation, has become a national liability. Those who choose this career path are doomed as less fortunate among their peers in the pure and, even, social sciences. This is the neo-liberal thinking that undergirds President Buhari’s needless admonition to the Kankara boys. As students of science, there was no need for the president to give them any career lesson on the “uselessness” of historical studies. One of the tragic cultural assaults committed against Nigeria is in denying Nigerians the opportunity to learn and appreciate the rich cultures and histories of the different ethnic groups that constitute the nation. Nigeria is gasping for air in the wake of the endemic crisis of nationhood and the poverty of historical consciousness, but President Buhari thinks that historians are liabilities to the nation. Nigeria needs more historians today more than ever before! What the country requires is a heavy investment in cultural engineering in order to create a shared narrative of unity that values and celebrates diversity as a national treasure. The relegation of History in Nigeria goes back to the late 1980s. The Structural Adjustment Programme of the government then set in motion a trajectory of fiscal crises, which led to drastic cuts in public expenditure on education. The Federal Government gradually lost its initial proclivity for cultural engineering. The glaring evidence of this was the removal of History from the school curricula.