As Nigeria marks its 66th independence anniversary today, education offers perhaps the most revealing lens through which to view the country’s journey. What it inherited in 1960 was a narrow, elitist system built to serve a privileged few. Six and a half decades later, it has become one of Africa’s largest education systems, with tens of millions of learners in classrooms and hundreds of universities dotting the national landscape. Yet, this dramatic expansion in access masks a deeper, more troubling reality, OWEDE AGBAJILEKE reports.

Nigeria’s 66-year education journey has expanded access and institutions, but persistent issues of underfunding, poor learning outcomes, inequality, and recurring university strikes underscore the need to shift from expansion to quality and meaningful human capital development.

According to data obtained from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) at independence, Nigeria had only 311 secondary schools and two tertiary institutions – the University of Ibadan (UI) and Yaba College of Technology (YABATECH). Today, the National Universities Commission (NUC) lists over 320 universities, comprising 77 federal, 69 state and 182 private institutions.

Stakeholders said the expansion represents one of the clearest gains of the past 66 years, opening opportunities for millions of Nigerians who would otherwise have had little chance of secondary or tertiary education.

The introduction of Universal Primary Education in 1976 marked another major turning point. Primary enrolment, which stood at about 2.9 million in 1960, rose to 13.8 million by 1975 and exceeded 15.8 million by 1980, according to UNESCO.

The Universal Basic Education (UBE) programme, introduced in 1999 and backed by legislation in 2004, further entrenched the principle of free and compulsory basic education.

The expansion has also improved girls’ participation. Data from the Federal Ministry of Education’s 2024/25 yearly school census put female learners at 49.6 per cent, while women account for 55.7 per cent of teachers.

The figures show a major departure from the early post-independence period, when access to formal education, particularly for girls in some parts of the country, was considerably more restricted.

But the expansion of the system has exposed a more fundamental problem: Nigeria concentrated heavily on access without achieving a corresponding improvement in learning outcomes.

The latest evidence is sobering. An analysis of public financing for basic education by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) found that in 2023, 49 per cent of Primary Three pupils, 67 per cent of Primary Five pupils and 86 per cent of Junior Secondary School Two learners failed to attain minimum proficiency in mathematics.

The same analysis found that about 30 per cent of learners who reached Junior Secondary Three in 2021 lacked foundational reading skills expected to have been acquired several years earlier.

The implication is significant. A child being enrolled in school does not necessarily mean that the child is learning.

After 66 years of independence, Nigeria’s education challenge has, therefore, moved beyond simply building schools and increasing enrolment to ensuring that children can read, write, calculate and acquire skills required to participate productively in society.

The problem is compounded by the number of children still excluded from the system.

According to UNICEF’s 2024 report, Nigeria has approximately 18.3 million out-of-school children, comprising 10.2 million of primary school age and 8.1 million of secondary school age.

The burden is particularly severe in parts of northern Nigeria, where poverty, insecurity, displacement, child labour and cultural barriers continue to affect school attendance, especially among girls.

The scale of the education system itself has also placed enormous pressure on available resources. The 2024/25 yearly school census recorded about 39.83 million learners and 1.19 million teachers. Yet, the national learner-to-classroom ratio was 60 to one, considerably above the Universal Basic Education standard of 35 to one.

The learner-to-toilet ratio was 65.9 to one, compared with a recommended 30 to one.The situation is further complicated by inadequate funding. UNICEF’s analysis of public financing for basic education found that education’s share of total government expenditure declined from 9.3 per cent in 2015 to 3.6 per cent in 2023, significantly below the internationally recommended benchmark of 15 to 20 per cent.

With a rapidly growing school-age population, inadequate financing has continued to widen the gap between enrolment and the quality of facilities and services available to learners.

The funding challenge is reflected in the condition of many public schools, where overcrowded classrooms, dilapidated laboratories and libraries, poor sanitation and lack of teaching materials remain common.
It also extends to teachers, who are expected to serve an increasingly large and diverse population of learners.

Although the 2024/25 school census recorded about 1.19 million teachers, the national figures mask significant disparities between states and schools in teacher availability, qualification and distribution.

At the tertiary level, the phenomenal growth in the number of universities has not been matched by commensurate investment in infrastructure, research and human capital, leaving many institutions grappling with overcrowded facilities, inadequate funding and declining staff morale.

The latest threat of industrial action by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) over the non-implementation of the 2025 renegotiated agreement with the Federal Government has again exposed the fragile state of industrial relations in the sector.

The planned strike, coming amid years of recurring disputes over funding, salaries, working conditions and university autonomy, underscores the unresolved challenges confronting Nigeria’s higher education sub-sector.

While the proliferation of universities has widened access and produced generations of professionals who have contributed to national and global development, repeated disruptions to the academic calendar have imposed significant costs on students and institutions.

The Initiator of the Creative Change Centre, Omole Ibukun, said 66 years after independence, Nigeria had undoubtedly built a much larger education system than it inherited, expanding universities, polytechnics, colleges, secondary schools and basic education, with millions of Nigerians gaining opportunities that were hitherto unavailable to their parents and grandparents.

However, Ibukun noted that the country’s report card remained troubling if education was expected to serve as a mechanism for reproducing and expanding human capacity.

He lamented that millions of Nigerian children remain out of school, while UNICEF figures show primary school attendance at about 67 per cent, lower secondary at 45 per cent, and upper secondary at only 35 per cent.

According to him, Nigeria has also normalised the contradiction of governments describing education as the foundation of national development, while consistently failing to finance it at the level required to make that rhetoric meaningful, noting that UNICEF reported that education’s share of total government spending fell from 9.3 per cent in 2015 to 3.6 per cent in 2024, against the international benchmark of 15 to 20 per cent.

He added that the limited resources allocated to education were further undermined by corruption involving government officials.

Ibukun, however, said he would not conclude that Nigeria had failed in education, as the country recorded enormous progress in expanding educational opportunities.

Rather, he argued that Nigeria has failed to build an education system commensurate with its size, wealth, aspirations and demographic realities.

“For me, it’s not about how many poorly maintained and poorly staffed schools we have built, but about what kind of human being the Nigerian education system is producing, who gets to become that person, and the kind of society we are building through education,” he stated.

Until those fundamental questions are answered, Ibukun noted that the country would continue treating symptoms of the crisis – including ASUU strikes, overcrowded classrooms, examination malpractice, graduate unemployment and the growing number of out-of-school children – without confronting the more fundamental question of what Nigeria’s government believes education is actually meant to achieve.

On his part, Nigerian-born biotech executive based in San Francisco, United States, Dr AdeboyeAdewoye, said the country had made substantial progress in education over the decades, stressing that any fair assessment of the country’s educational journey should begin by clearly defining the measure, whether the comparison is between 1960 and 2026, or focuses on primary, secondary or tertiary education, enrolment, literacy, graduation rates, the number of institutions or Nigeria’s standing globally.

He said the growth in the number of high-achieving Nigerians both at home and abroad, as well as the expansion of private and state-owned tertiary institutions, wider access to education and newer initiatives such as student loans, were important indicators of progress that should not be overlooked.

According to Adewoye, Nigeria still has serious shortcomings to address, but acknowledging those challenges should not require the country to deny its gains.

“Progress and imperfection can coexist, and Nigeria’s educational journey is evidence of both,” he said.

A former Director at the Federal Ministry of Education and education policy analyst, Dr Amina Bello, said the core failure of the last two decades has been the disconnect between policy pronouncements and implementation at the state and local government levels.

She noted that while the UBE Act guarantees free basic education, many states still levy fees, fail to access matching grants from the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC),and leave teacher recruitment to political patronage.

“We have good policies on paper. What we lack is accountability for learning. Until states are measured not by how many schools they built but by how many children can read by age 10, the crisis will persist,” Bello said.

Similarly, a professor of Educational Management at the University of Benin (UNIBEN), Prof. Chidi Maduagwu, argued that the university expansion must be halted in favour of consolidation and quality assurance. He said licensing new universities without solving funding and staffing gaps has created glorified secondary schools rather than research institutions.

“You cannot have world-class aspirations with third-class funding. The NUC should after imposing a moratorium on new universities, channel resources into fixing existing ones, improving teacher training and linking curricula to industry needs. That is how you move from access to human-capital development,” Maduagwu said.