The School That Replaced the State -By Stephen Sunday Laabes

Nigeria’s private school explosion is routinely celebrated as entrepreneurial energy and parental ambition. It is also, if you look at it honestly, a monument to public failure — and the monument is getting bigger every year.

Somewhere in the middle-income belt of a Nigerian city it could be Kaduna, Ibadan, Enugu, or a dozen others there is a street where three private schools occupy what were, fifteen years ago, residential compounds. One is painted yellow with a logo that looks designed by someone who has seen too many American franchise branding guides. Another advertises “British curriculum” on a hand-painted sign, the word “British” doing considerable work that the building itself is not equipped to support. The third is simply called “Excellence Academy” or “Greatness Schools” or some similar aspirational noun, because in Nigerian private education, the name must promise what the state has stopped pretending to deliver. These schools exist because parents made a rational calculation. The public school down the road has fifty children in a class, a roof that leaks, textbooks from 2009, and teachers whose salaries arrive irregularly and whose morale has adjusted accordingly. The private school costs money the family cannot easily afford. They pay it anyway.

This scene, replicated across virtually every urban and peri-urban neighbourhood in Nigeria, is what the private school boom actually looks like at ground level. It is not, primarily, a story about elite institutions with swimming pools and Oxbridge-bound alumni, though those exist and get most of the commentary. It is a story about millions of ordinary Nigerian families making a desperate bet: that paying school fees they can barely afford is better than surrendering their children to a public system that has, in too many places, effectively stopped functioning as an educational institution and continued mainly as a building that children attend.

The numbers give some shape to the phenomenon. Nigeria has, by various estimates, more than 60,000 registered private schools, with the true number — including the vast grey market of unregistered, barely-regulated operators, likely significantly higher. Private school enrolment has grown steadily for two decades, and in urban areas of many southern states, private schools now account for the majority of primary school pupils. This is not a niche. It is a restructuring of how a nation educates its children, happening without a policy decision, without a national debate, and without any serious reckoning with what it means for the majority who cannot access it.

“The private school is not a supplement to the public system. In too many Nigerian cities, it has become the system — and the people left in public schools are there because they had no other option.”

The political economy of this shift deserves careful examination, because it is not accidental. Nigerian public education has been underfunded, at the federal and state levels, for so long that the underfunding has become structural — it is no longer a crisis response to fiscal pressure but the baseline expectation around which everything else is organised. UNESCO recommends that countries allocate at least 15 to 20 percent of government expenditure to education. Nigeria’s allocation has consistently fallen below this threshold, and what does reach the education budget is not always spent on the things that determine educational quality: teacher training, instructional materials, school infrastructure, or the kind of sustained oversight that prevents schools from becoming credential factories. The money that does flow often flows upward, to consultants, to contractors building school buildings that teachers won’t be trained to use, to allowances and per diems at conferences where education policy is discussed without the people most affected by it in the room.

Into this vacuum, private enterprise moved. And here is where the story gets genuinely complicated, because the private school sector in Nigeria is not monolithic, and honest analysis requires resisting the temptation to either celebrate it wholesale or dismiss it as exploitation. At the high end, Nigeria has produced genuinely excellent private schools, institutions with capable teachers, coherent curricula, and track records of student achievement that are real rather than manufactured. These schools have demonstrated something important: that Nigerian children, given adequate resources and institutional commitment, can learn to the highest standards. That is not a trivial demonstration. It is a rebuke to the fatalism that sometimes creeps into discussions of Nigerian education.

But the high-end schools are not the private school boom. The boom is the yellow-painted compound school, the “British curriculum” aspirational, the Excellence Academy. These schools operate in a regulatory environment that is, in practice, largely unenforced. State governments maintain registers of approved private schools and the theoretical authority to inspect and close non-compliant ones. In practice, the inspection regimes are underfunded, subject to the same patronage dynamics that afflict Nigerian governance more broadly, and sporadic in their application. Schools that should not be operating, those with unqualified teachers, inadequate facilities, or fraudulent curriculum claims continue operating because the cost of enforcement is high and the political will is low. The parent paying for “British curriculum” and receiving something rather different has limited recourse. She is too busy working to investigate, and the alternative is the public school she already decided she could not accept.

“When the rich send their children abroad and the middle class sends theirs to private schools, what remains in the public system is not just underfunded — it is politically abandoned. The people with power to demand better have already opted out.”

The social stratification consequences of this arrangement are profound and underappreciated. A society’s educational system is one of its primary mechanisms for either reproducing or disrupting inherited advantage. When the rich educate their children in Swiss boarding schools or British sixth forms, the upper-middle class in expensive Lagos private schools, the aspirational middle class in the Excellence Academies of their neighbourhoods, and the poor in whatever public institution remains, the result is not merely inequality in educational outcome. It is the institutionalisation of separate societies, people who will never share a classroom, develop no common reference points, and emerge into adulthood with vastly different capabilities and social networks, their trajectories largely determined before they were ten years old.

Nigeria is not unique in having private schools, or in having wealthy families choose them. What is distinctive about the Nigerian situation is the near-total withdrawal of the political class from the public system. In countries where public education functions reasonably well, Finland, to cite the obvious example, but also closer analogues like Ghana or Rwanda, which have made more consistent investments in public school quality, the people who make policy decisions about education have a personal stake in the public system because their own children are in it. In Nigeria, at the federal and state levels, the children of governors, ministers, legislators, and senior civil servants are overwhelmingly in private schools in Nigeria or abroad. This creates a clean separation between the people who decide what public education receives and the people who depend on what it delivers. The incentive to improve a system your own children do not use is, at best, philanthropic. And Nigerian governance has not been distinguished by its philanthropy toward the poor.

There is a version of the private school argument that reframes all of this as a success story. The argument runs: the state failed, the market responded, parents have choice, and the explosion of private provision demonstrates Nigerian entrepreneurialism and the limits of statist thinking about public services. This argument is not entirely without merit. The responsiveness of private schools to parental demand the reason they tend to have better attendance records, more parental engagement, and more pressure on teachers to perform  reflects something real about the accountability structures that private relationships create that public bureaucracies often fail to replicate. If a parent is paying fees, she is more likely to show up at the school gate. If the school wants to keep her fees, it is more likely to respond.

But the market-as-solution argument founders on the same question it always founders on: a market solution is only a solution for the people who can participate in the market. Nigeria has a poverty rate that, by the National Bureau of Statistics’ own multi-dimensional measure, exceeds 60 percent nationally and is considerably higher in the north. The children of the genuinely poor are not choosing between the public school and the private school. They are in the public school, or they are not in school at all. For them, the private school boom is not an opportunity. It is a daily reminder that the system designed to serve them has been quietly abandoned by everyone with the means to abandon it, and that the political energy required to fix it has been redirected into a parallel system that serves other people’s children.

What would it actually take to reverse this dynamic  not to eliminate private schools, which is neither possible nor desirable, but to rebuild public education to the point where it is a genuine option rather than a last resort? The honest answer is that it requires a level of political commitment that is currently absent, for the structural reason already identified: the people who make the decisions are not invested in the outcome. Changing that requires either changing who makes the decisions through the kind of grassroots political organising around education quality that has, in other contexts, forced the issue onto the agenda or changing the incentive structure, perhaps through mandatory public school enrolment for the children of elected officials and senior civil servants, a proposal that sounds radical and is, in many ways, simply a description of how most functional democracies operate.

Short of that, there are incremental interventions that have demonstrated impact: direct school grants that bypass the patronage networks between state education ministries and individual schools; teacher welfare reforms that treat the profession as a competitive career rather than a fallback; community-based school management committees with real authority and real accountability; technology-assisted learning programmes in contexts where teacher quality is hardest to improve quickly. None of these are sufficient alone. All of them require sustained political will and recurrent budget commitment, the two things Nigerian education policy has been most consistently denied.

The yellow-painted compound school will keep filling up as long as the public school down the road keeps emptying of everything that makes education worthwhile. Every new private school that opens is, in its way, a data point about the state of Nigerian governance, a signal that another set of parents has concluded that the state cannot be trusted with their children’s futures. That conclusion is, in most cases, entirely rational. Making it irrational again, making the public school the kind of place a parent would genuinely choose, is one of the most important and most neglected policy challenges in Africa’s most populous country.

The market did not create this crisis. The state did, through decades of disinvestment, patronage, and the quiet political decision to let public education decay because the people with power had already made other arrangements. The market merely arrived to charge families for the consequences. Understanding that distinction is the beginning of doing something about it.