I will like to ask two fundamental questions that lie at the heart of this lecture. One, what happens when we situate AI at the heart of the institutional reform of the education sector in Nigeria? And two, how does that AI-inflected reform enable us to think more about the sustainability of the reform efforts? Thinking about the role and place of AI in Nigeria’s public sector reform points at both limitations and possibilities.

We will begin to understand the magnitude of Nigeria’s educational dilemma once we take notice of where we are coming from. Colonisation created a heterogeneous society divided along cultural, ethnic and religious lines. After independence, the Nigerian state had to struggle with 30 years of military regime before the commencement of democratic leadership in 1999.

The point, therefore, is that any postcolonial state, like Nigeria, that has to reckon with an educational philosophy for such a diverse society needs to be adequately prepared. The National Policy on Education (NPE)indeed has to factor into the realisation of its objectives, Nigeria’s colonial heritage, the dominance of western education, the dismal economic performance of the past years, the growing demographic factors—like gender and youth—that have steadily increased the demand for education and human capital development. Lastly, and even more important, is the political direction that the centralisation of education administration took in Nigeria despite the fact of our diversity and the implications of Nigeria’s federal status.

The first challenge of the NPE for me, therefore, is its fixation with what Paulo Freire has called the “banking” conception of education—the view that learning consists of pouring facts into the receptive and uncritical minds of the pupils and students. This is not a conception of education that can serve as the basis for a developmental education Nigeria needs to achieve its nation-building and development aspirations.

In addition to this philosophical deficit in the NPE, the framework of the NPE also uncritically differentiates between the sciences and the humanities in ways that led to the discouragement of the knowledge of history and critical thinking as crucial elements that instigate in the students the balance of learning to know, learning to do and learning to live with others. This incoherent philosophical basis is therefore the reason why theory and practice, as well as expectations and outcomes, with regard to education in Nigeria, do not match up.

The second issue is that the education sector has also been caught up in the unitary federalism that the military imposed on Nigeria’s political culture. The implication is that the federal government is then forced to take up the burden that ought to be better creatively shared, or that it ought to outrightly devolve to the other tiers of the federation.

It is therefore not surprising, given the current state of Nigeria’s political economy, that the funding of the education sector came up as the number one issue. It is compounded by the depreciating quality and dwindling availability of facilities. There is also a lack of cogent data and statistics to back up the performance of the education sector across the states and local governments with significant analytics, policy-engaged action research, scenario planning cum prospecting and strategic policy intelligence.

Beyond the technical issues of low teacher quality, disarticulated teacher education, lack of integrated curriculum, lack of recognition of non-formal education, the low status of technical and vocational education, and the gender imbalance. I am more concerned with the larger question involving the overall disconnection between the NPE and Nigeria’s search for an economic and governance template that will be driven by the human capital development that the education sector is supposed to initiate and galvanise.

The other dimension of this deficiency is that the Nigerian education system is not grounded in entrepreneurial and skill acquisition that prepares the students for the future, except to be unfortunate pawns in the scramble for white collar jobs. In other words, Nigeria’s education system is not generating wealth, nor is it creating a national culture and values of self-dependence and self-reliance in the citizenry.

My final diagnosis has to do with the correlation between current curricula and modernising aspirations that Nigeria needs for development. The curricular iteration of the education system in Nigeria is not keeping up quickly enough with the changing dynamics of the modern world. This is where artificial intelligence, the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) and the education sector intersect. The fourth industrial revolution is defined by the technological revolution, especially by telecommunication and digital technologies, that have erased the distinction we make between biological, digital and physical realms. It connects the human world with the operations of self-regulating and self-learning algorithms, which altogether outline an emerging knowledge society determined by significant developments from the Internet of Things and cloud computing to big data to automated machines and integrated systems. The biggest event of the 4IR is the emergence of artificial intelligence, and the total transformation of the way we look at human capacities and capabilities.

It is straightforward to immediately see how the impact of AI on the contours of the knowledge society affects how we reflect on the educational system. The larger picture, therefore, is that the pathway of a country’s connection to the 4IR is through an educational system that harnesses and deploys artificial intelligence and the digital technologies in facilitating an improved competency and skills capacitation of human capital that will eventually form the bedrock of the evolution of a developmental state.

AI and the other paraphernalia of the 4IR are the focus of every policy transformation that affects the education system of many societies across the world. It involves significant variations in curriculum, from entrepreneurship and ICT to digital education and STEM.
Quite unfortunately, the state of Nigeria’s education system reflects the state of institutional inertia that affects many of the critical sector of the Nigerian governmental sectors, especially the public service. I should know about this, given that I have spent the entirety of my professional life as a public servant trying to jumpstart and drive institutional reform.

Despite the many benefits of AI to the educational system, its introduction into the Nigerian context challenges our infrastructural and institutional readiness. The 4IR needs power and significant investments in infrastructure to run, in order to be able to successfully and optimally innovate the teaching and learning experience of faculty and students.

It is within this infrastructural gap that Nigeria’s relationship with AI is still by default. This challenge is compounded by the extent of the digital literacy—how to make the smooth and seamless transition from chalkboard to chatbot, without replicating the educational gap that has already introduced social gaps across the country, especially between the north and the south.

Going forward, the starting point of an institutional reform of the education sector is to get the basics right. And that involves, in the first place, a critical shift away from the rampant tendency to load a surplus of models, diagnosis, best practices, concepts and modelling analytics on the education system by specialists and expertise who are sometimes themselves burdened by a conception-reality disconnect that allow them to throw all sorts of “solutions” without a demonstrating deep understanding of the problem at the level of getting things done, or of a fundamental policy-engaged research and evidence-based analytics, one grounded within an interdisciplinary community of practice. To get the basic rights, in connecting education design and implementation, requires a singularly pragmatic and strategic out-of-the-box problem-solving managerial acumen.

This pragmatic thinking enables the government to strategically optimise the scarce resources in terms of money, men, materials, machine and method (the 5Ms) that are synchronised to achieve performance and results within a result-based change management framework.

This will include the capacity to create the balance in such vital performance indicators as access, relevance, quality, standards, internal and external efficiency and effectiveness, equity, internationalisation, etc., all within a framework of action that targets modernisation through artificial intelligence and its multiple benefits and advantages.

And this unravels for us the significance of the Tinubu administration and its determination to push education to the forefront of national development, by connecting it with the 4IR. We need to first applaud the courage of approving a 7.3 per cent (N3.52trn) budgetary allocation to education, the highest of such allocation in Nigeria’s history.

And to also appreciate the forceful and pragmatic policy initiatives of the Honourable Minister for Education, Dr Morufu Tunji Alausa, in terms of the push for basic education, the revamping of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET).

The increased funding for education signals an education financing model, deepened by the Education Loan Fund, to catalyse and accelerate sustainable and inclusive national socioeconomic growth and transformation made imperative by an AI—driven transformation across all sectors.

In terms of change management dynamics, the government must fast-track this ongoing institutional reform through the following dynamics that focus on higher education as a key locus for policy and developmental initiatives.

Olaopa is Professor of Public Administration and Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja.
He delivered this at the 2nd distinguished personality lecture of the Emmanuel Alayande University of Education, Oyo, recently.