What Is Actually Wrong With Education in Nigeria? Nobody Wants to Say It.

First: The Government

NERDC — the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council — designs beautiful curriculum frameworks. Detailed. Comprehensive. Internationally referenced. They are genuinely impressive documents. That nobody follows.

Because designing a curriculum and enforcing it are two completely different jobs, and Nigeria has only ever shown up for the first one. Across thousands of private schools, regulatory oversight is essentially nonexistent. A proprietor can run whatever programme they like, call it whatever they want, charge whatever feels profitable, and nobody is coming to check.

But that is not even the most alarming part. The most alarming part is this: in the 2026 federal budget, education received approximately 6.15% to 6.54% of total allocation. The UNESCO benchmark for structural stability is 15% to 20%. We are not close. We are not even in the same conversation. We are starving the system and then wondering why the system is malnourished.

Meanwhile, children in so-called international schools — schools operating on Nigerian soil, collecting Nigerian naira (or much sought-after forex in some instances) from Nigerian parents, teaching predominantly Nigerian children — are graduating with zero knowledge of Yoruba, Igbo, or Hausa. Local language is an optional after-school club. Nigerian history has been surgically removed. These children can tell you about the Tudors and the Roman invasion of England. Ask them who Olusegun Obasanjo is and watch the silence descend.

We are raising children who have no emotional or intellectual equity in the country they were born in. Read that again and you know why patriotism is not a thing in Naija. We are not running a school system. We are running a pipeline that exports human capital with zero attachment to solving Nigerian problems.

Second: School Owners / Boards

Let us talk about the business model. Because that is exactly what it has become. A business. An extractive, margin-maximising, labour-exploiting business dressed in a school uniform.

The playbook is simple. Hire one teacher. Assign that teacher the work of three. Keep the salary of the other two. Call it efficiency.

In Year 5 and Year 6 classrooms across Nigeria, a single homeroom teacher is expected to deliver English, Science, and Mathematics — subjects that each require specialist knowledge — while also managing behaviour, writing reports, running duties, and coordinating a club.

Here is the data that should embarrass every school owner in Nigeria. Research on Nigerian school environments shows teachers spending 75.8% of their time in direct teaching, the remaining on manual data entry, grading and marking. And it is not remotely enough even if most stay in school till 7pm. That is not a timetable. That is a hostage situation.

And the marking. Let us talk about the marking.

A mathematics teacher with four classes of twenty-five students is looking at one hundred books. Every day. School management leaves the teacher ninety minutes free. Ninety minutes. For one hundred books. That is fifty-four seconds per book. You cannot read a child's name in fifty-four seconds, let alone diagnose whether their error is a conceptual misunderstanding or a procedural slip.

So the marking becomes performative. A tick here. A cross there. A grade at the bottom. No feedback. No insight. No data. And then the same management that created this impossible condition turns around and asks: why are our students not improving?

Third: Parents

This one is going to sting. But it needs to be said.

Nigerian parents have confused paying fees with providing oversight. They are not the same thing. They have never been the same thing.

The PTA — which was designed to be an accountability mechanism, a watchdog, a voice for what happens inside school walls — has been defanged. It is now a social club. A fundraising committee. A WhatsApp group where people (I mean parents, teachers are often excluded or have excluded themselves from all deliberations) argue about the end-of-year party.

Schools have done this deliberately. They treat teacher timetables, staff turnover rates, subject schemes, and lesson preparation metrics as trade secrets. They hide the data because the data is damning. And parents let them hide it because the fees are paid and the uniform is ironed and the school has a nice gate.

Here is what would happen if parents actually demanded to see a teacher's weekly timetable: the illusion of luxury education would collapse in real time. If you knew that the teacher handling your child's English Language — for which you are paying ₦2 million per term — is assigned a class eighty percent of the available time on the schedule; and has ninety minutes to mark one hundred books and plan engaging lessons, you would not be posting the school logo on your Instagram story. You would be in that office on Monday morning. What would you even say? You are alone.

If the school has nothing to hide, they will show you. If they hesitate, they have already answered your question.

Your fees are not oversight. Your presence is.

Fourth: Teachers

You are the most overworked, most underpaid, most systematically exploited group in this conversation. That is true. And it needs to be said first.

But.

Professional integrity is not contingent on perfect conditions. It is most visible under imperfect ones. If you really cannot stick it. Leave.

Assessment is not optional. It is the core of the job. Not the ticking of boxes. Not the dragging of a pen across forty pages to prove you looked. Real diagnostic assessment — the kind that identifies whether a child's error is conceptual or procedural, individual or systemic — is a cognitive act. It requires time and focus that the system does not give you.

So what do you do? You fight for the time. You plan one week ahead — Monday of Week 6 planned on Monday of Week 5. You document what you observe. You resist the pressure to skim. Give due diligence to those you can. Leave the rest. Do not skim. Because when you skim, the child pays the price. And the child is not the one who built the timetable. Above all, lodge formal complaints stating evidence of your schedule, the realities of how long each task takes and exactly what you do to stay afloat.

The system is broken. That is not in dispute. But a broken system does not absolve a professional of the responsibility to maintain standards within their own classroom. You are the last line of defence between a dysfunctional institution and an individual child who deserves better.

Do not let a broken system make you indifferent to your reputation.

So. Where Does This Leave Us?

Nigerian education is not failing because of bad luck. It is failing because of bad systems, bad incentives, bad oversight, and a collective willingness to look away as long as the surface looks acceptable.

The government is underfunding and under-regulating. School owners are over-extracting and under-investing. Parents are over-paying and under-questioning. Teachers are overworked and undervalued.

Every single stakeholder has a role in the collapse. And every single stakeholder has a role in the recovery.

The schools that will matter in the next decade are the ones making different choices right now. Better timetables. Honest assessment. Specialist teaching. Transparent management. Real pastoral care. Teachers who are treated like professionals and therefore perform like professionals.