Sunday Edition — On A Straight Line

Editor's Note

I’ve known Arogz since secondary school. We sat in the same government boarding school classrooms in the early 2000s, including the months-long stretches without power that he writes about below. That shared history is part of why this essay landed the way it did when he sent it to me. Arogz makes an argument that’s uncomfortable in its precision: Nigeria’s education crisis isn’t a funding problem or a talent problem, it’s a design problem, one built for compliance rather than competence, and inherited rather than chosen. What follows is one of the more clear-eyed reckonings with that inheritance I’ve read. Read it slowly, and then read the last line twice.

On A Straight Line! On A Straight Line! On A Straight Line!

 

You have probably seen the video on TikTok or even danced as you heard what has now become one of the pop-culture ad-libs of 2026 in the club. It’s the video of the teacher on an assembly ground repeating the same instruction, “on a straight line, on a straight line,” while the children dance, play, and remain completely, cheerfully unbothered. My first reaction when I saw the video was bewilderment. What we call education in Nigeria is broken and we need to start to fix it somehow.

Nigeria has 18.3 million out-of-school children according to UNICEF’s 2024 report — the largest such population on earth, roughly 15 percent of the global total. By January 2026, Save the Children estimated the figure had reached 28 million when digital learning exclusion is factored in. These numbers are alarming. But they are not the most alarming number.

The most alarming number is this: 74 percent of Nigerian children aged 7 to 14 cannot read a simple sentence or perform basic arithmetic. This means that most children who are in school are sitting in classrooms without acquiring the foundational skills that make schooling meaningful. Enrolment is not education and a child in a classroom is not the same as a child who is learning.

To understand why, you have to go back further than any single administration.

Tobi Lawson, writing in the 1914 Reader, draws on economists Hanushek and Woessmann to make a point that is damning in its simplicity: economic growth correlates not with years of schooling but with cognitive skills actually acquired. Countries that expanded schools without improving learning saw no productivity dividend. He goes further, citing historian Agustina Paglayan, to argue that mass schooling was not originally designed to build productive citizens but to build compliant ones. Discipline and deference were always the primary product. Literacy was secondary.

In Nigeria, this logic was doubled. Colonial education was explicitly designed to produce clerks and administrators for the colonial bureaucracy, not engineers or industrialists. The post-independence system inherited that architecture without interrogating it. The result, generations later, is a classroom that asks children for compliance and delivers neither compliance nor competence in return. When you add schools built and run by the military and religious institutions to the mix, this logic is further deepened.

Nigeria’s 2025 federal education allocation of ₦3.52 trillion is, in nominal naira terms, the highest in the country’s history. It is also, at roughly 6 to 7 percent of the national budget, less than half of UNESCO’s minimum benchmark. Kenya allocates 20 percent of its national budget to education. Ghana, 13 percent. Egypt, 12 percent. Nigeria, with the most severe learning crisis on the continent, sits at 6 to 7 percent and has done so without meaningful variation for a decade.

But the size is almost beside the point. Over 65 percent of the budget is consumed by salaries, leaving less than 30 percent for classrooms, materials, and infrastructure. And much of what is allocated never arrives. In the government boarding secondary school I attended in the early 2000s, we sometimes went months without power supply from the national grid.

The Athena Centre for Policy and Leadership described the situation perfectly — Nigeria is not under-spending because it cannot afford to spend. It is under-prioritising education relative to other expenditures while simultaneously failing to extract value from what it does spend.

This is where the education crisis becomes something larger.

Nigeria is, at its economic foundation, still a largely agrarian economy that developed a services sector while attempting to skip industrialisation at scale. The industries that took root — telecoms, banking, FMCG, petrol retail — reward commercial agility and can import their critical technical infrastructure rather than build it domestically. The sectors that require deep domestic technical competency such as power generation, manufacturing, large-scale engineering have remained persistently stunted.

This is not coincidence. Industrialisation runs on a specific kind of human capital: workers who can maintain machinery, read and improve manuals, troubleshoot systematically, and improve production incrementally. South Korea built that pipeline in a generation. So did Taiwan. It does not come from a classroom built around compliance and rote memorisation. Nigeria was never educated for industrialisation. The colonial system produced clerks and not philosophers and engineers.

Nigeria’s population will reach 400 million by mid-century. Over 60 percent of Nigerians are already under 25. If that generation arrives at adulthood without foundational literacy or technical competency, they do not become the demographic dividend that optimists project. They become the crisis.

Here is a fact that rarely appears in policy documents: Nigeria’s middle class and elite have already rendered their verdict on the public education system. They voted with their wallets. Private schools, from the elite international campuses of Lagos and Abuja to the proprietary neighbourhood schools charging ₦30,000 a term across every city now educate a significant and growing share of Nigerian children whose families can afford the alternative. This secession is rational at the individual level but catastrophic at the national level.

When the people who are supposed to have the loudest voices and the most political access have no personal stake in government schools, government schools do not get fixed. The constituency that could most effectively demand accountability — educated, economically active, politically connected Nigerians — has removed its own children from the equation. What remains is a public system whose primary users are the people with the least power to demand better, and a political class with no skin in the game.

Private school enrolment is not a solution to Nigeria’s education crisis. It is evidence that the people who could solve it have chosen not to. The irony is that majority of Nigeria’s current middle class was educated by these public schools.

And yet, in the gaps the state has abandoned, something remarkable keeps happening.

Chess in Slums Africa, founded by Tunde Onakoya, operates in some of Lagos’s most marginalised communities using chess, STEM education, and socio-emotional development to reach children who the formal system has written off. From those sessions under bridges and in community spaces came Fawaz, an 18-year-old chess champion from Oshodi. The organisation’s mission is to reach one million children across Africa over the next decade. Their scholarship cost: ₦200,000 per year for primary and secondary education.

Let It Shine Academy (LISA) and similar grassroots organisations are doing the same work in different registers — free schooling, structured mentorship, direct intervention in communities where the state is absent.

These organisations matter for two reasons. First, because they are directly changing the lives of the children they reach. Second, and more importantly, because they are making an argument that Nigeria’s education establishment consistently fails to make: those children can learn. The same child who dances unbothered while a teacher repeats “on a straight line” can become a national chess champion if someone builds the right environment around him. The problem was never the children.

But Tunde Onakoya cannot fix 28 million children. No NGO can. The question is what these organisations are pointing toward, and who has the resources to follow that pointer at scale.

The current model of elite giving in Nigerian education produces school buildings with plaques and photo opportunities rarely produces learning. A new school building that the state cannot staff, maintain, and cannot supply with books is a monument, not an intervention.

The more useful question is: what does private wealth do that government cannot, and what does it do that changes the system rather than decorating its edges?

First: fund the unglamorous inputs that enable scale. Teacher training is not photogenic. A state-level learning assessment system is not photogenic. Curriculum development materials that reach every public school classroom in Kano or Rivers State are not photogenic. But these are the investments that change what happens inside ten thousand classrooms simultaneously, rather than one school with a donor’s name on the gate. MTN Foundation, the Dangote Foundation, Access Bank’s education CSR — these organisations have the capital to operate at state level.

Second: convert philanthropy into governance leverage. Nigeria’s largest corporates have relationships with state governors. That access is the most valuable resource they own and the least used. A coordinated campaign by major businesses conditional on measurable education governance improvements, published learning outcomes, UBEC fund access rates converts private money into systemic pressure.

Third: win the battle for the mind of the young Nigerian.

There is a narrative spreading through Nigerian popular culture that is more dangerous than any budget shortfall. It goes like this: school is a scam. The certificate is worthless. Wizkid didn’t finish university. The billionaires on your timeline built their wealth through hustle, not homework. Why sit in a broken classroom for twelve years when you can learn a skill, get on TikTok, and eat? The narrative is understandable. It is also quietly devastating at scale.

This is where Nigerian media, content creators, and popular culture have a responsibility they are not currently meeting.

Nollywood has produced thousands of hours of content in which the educated character is the villain or the fool, and the street-smart hustler is the hero. Social media influencer culture has made visible a thin stratum of young Nigerians whose income comes from content, while making invisible the hundreds of millions for whom that path will never open. The counter-narrative needs to be built deliberately, by voices Nigerian youth actually trust.

What does it look like when a musician tells the truth about the years of structured practice — which is discipline, which is education — that preceded the hit? What does it look like when Nollywood makes a series in which a girl from a public school in Ibadan becomes an engineer, and the drama is the real drama of getting there? What does it look like when Fawaz from Oshodi becomes as famous as a Big Brother housemate, and his story is told not as a feel-good exception but as a replicable model? What does it look like when Nigerian podcasters, YouTubers, and TikTokers with millions of followers make education aspirational with the same energy they spend reviewing sneakers?

Education is not a scam. It is, for most Nigerians, the single most reliable mechanism for changing the economic trajectory of a life — not the only mechanism, but the most repeatable and the most accessible one available to a child with nothing except a functioning mind. The wealthy Nigerians and successful corporates who want to fix this problem should fund less of what looks like charity and more of what changes what Nigerian youth believe is possible for them.

Nigeria has the teachers, the buildings, the budgets, the NGOs, the diaspora, the corporate wealth, and the children. What it does not have is the political will to treat learning as a non-negotiable output rather than an optional by-product of enrolment. Until that changes, the system will keep doing what it was designed to do: fill classrooms, issue certificates, and produce a generation educated for obedience in a world that has no use for it.