Why the Best Graduates Do Not Become Teachers -By Stephen Sunday Laabes

Because we told them not to. We told them every single day, in every way that a country knows how to speak, and they listened.

I grew up in northern Nigeria watching teachers be humiliated. Not loudly. Not with intent. With the quiet, grinding, daily humiliation that comes from being made to feel that the work you do does not matter enough to be paid for on time, that the place you do it in does not matter enough to be maintained, that the children you do it for do not matter enough to be given books, and that you yourself do not matter enough to be treated as a professional rather than as a civil servant of the lower grades who should be grateful for whatever arrives and silent about whatever does not.

I watched teachers who had studied for years to stand in front of a classroom arrive at school to find they had no chalk. Not because chalk is expensive. Because the system responsible for providing chalk had decided, implicitly and repeatedly and without accountability, that chalk for a public school in northern Nigeria was not a priority. I watched teachers teach five periods in a row in a room with fifty-eight children when the seating was designed for thirty, in heat that made concentration an act of physical endurance, because there was no one else. I watched teachers leave at the end of the school day looking not tired in the way that productive work produces tiredness but depleted in the way that futility produces depletion. Drained not by effort but by the particular exhaustion of trying hard in a context that has made trying hard a private project rather than a collective commitment.

And I watched the best ones leave. Not in anger, mostly. In resignation. With the specific, quiet dignity of someone who has understood a message that was never stated directly but was communicated with absolute consistency: you are not valued here. Your gifts are not needed here. What we need here, we will extract from whoever cannot find something better. Go find something better.

They went. And the question Nigeria has been asking ever since, with apparent bafflement and genuine institutional denial, is why its schools are not producing the citizens, the thinkers, the innovators, the professionals, the human capital that a country of two hundred and twenty million people should be producing in abundance. The answer has been in front of us the entire time. We built a system designed to repel its best practitioners and then expressed surprise when the best practitioners left.

Let me tell you what Nigeria is offering the graduate it is asking to become a teacher in 2026. In some states in the north, that graduate will earn between forty-five thousand and fifty thousand naira per month. The national minimum wage is seventy thousand naira. Nigeria set a minimum wage because it decided no worker should earn less than that. Then it paid teachers, in states across the country, less than that minimum, without shame, without legal consequence, and without the sustained public outrage the fact deserves. The 2025 education budget allocated one point six four trillion naira for education personnel, which sounds enormous until you calculate what it means per teacher and discover it creates a gap of two hundred and ninety billion naira against what would be required simply to pay all teachers the minimum wage. Not a competitive salary. Not a professional salary. The legal minimum. Nigeria cannot find the money to pay its teachers the minimum wage it legally mandates for every other worker, and it has been in this position not for one year but as a recurring structural condition across multiple budget cycles.

That graduate being asked to accept forty-five thousand naira a month also graduated alongside people who went into banking and earn three times that in their first year. Who went into telecoms and earn four times that. Who japa’d to the UK or Canada and earn, in their first entry-level healthcare or social work or education roles, more in a month than a Nigerian public school teacher earns in a year. The comparison is not abstract. It is made in every graduating cohort, in every university careers fair, in every conversation between friends about what to do next. And it reaches the only conclusion the numbers permit. Teaching in Nigeria is not a career choice. It is what you do when the career choices are closed. And everyone who has a choice knows it.

The salary is not even the whole story. The salary is the headline. The conditions are the story underneath it that never stops. I have been in public school classrooms in northern Nigeria with pupil-to-teacher ratios of one to one hundred. One teacher. One hundred children. Think about what that means in practice. It means that the teacher does not know your name by October. It means that when you are confused, there are ninety-nine other confusions competing for the same attention. It means that differentiated teaching, the kind where the teacher recognises that this child needs more time on fractions while that child is ready to move forward, is not a pedagogical choice but an impossibility. It means that classroom management consumes the energy that teaching should use. It means that the teacher who trained to teach and arrives at a ratio of one to one hundred is not teaching. They are surviving the day. And surviving the day, multiplied across a career, is what produces the burnout, the absenteeism, the mental checkout, the broken spirit of a workforce that entered the profession with something to give and was given nothing in return except more to carry.

Half of basic education teachers in Nigeria do not have the minimum qualification, the Nigerian Certificate in Education. This number is always cited as evidence of teacher inadequacy. It is nothing of the sort. It is evidence of pipeline failure. Of colleges of education that have been underfunded for decades. Of a recruitment system that takes what it can get because what the conditions offer cannot attract what the system needs. Of a continuing professional development infrastructure that for most public school teachers in this country does not exist in any meaningful form. The teacher who lacks the NCE is not the problem. The system that produces NCE-less teachers and then blames them for it is the problem. And the system that allocates five to eight percent of its national budget to education when the international minimum recommendation is fifteen to twenty percent, while spending fifteen point eight trillion naira on debt service in a single budget year, has made its priorities legible to anyone paying attention.

I want to name something that the education conversation in Nigeria almost never names directly because it is too uncomfortable to say in the spaces where education policy is made. The concentration of this crisis in the north is not coincidental. The states with the lowest teacher salaries are northern states. The states with the worst pupil-to-teacher ratios are northern states. The states with the highest proportions of unqualified teachers are northern states. The states where salary arrears run longest, where school infrastructure is most degraded, where the UBEC matching grants go unclaimed because state governments cannot or will not provide the counterpart funding, are overwhelmingly northern states. This is not a natural condition. It is the product of specific governance failures in specific places over specific decades, and the communities bearing the cost of those failures are the communities that were already most disadvantaged to begin with. The education crisis in Nigeria is not evenly distributed. It is concentrated in the places least equipped to absorb it and among the children least positioned to survive it.

In those communities, I have watched something happen that breaks something in you when you understand what you are watching. The teacher who stays, the one who has no alternative or who has the specific stubbornness of someone who refuses to leave what they love despite what the system does to it, becomes over time a different kind of teacher than they intended to be. Not because they changed but because the system changed them. The ambition to ignite curiosity gives way to the goal of covering the syllabus. The desire to know each child gives way to the management of numbers. The professional confidence that comes from feeling valued and supported gives way to the protective caution of someone who has learned that initiative is not rewarded and that the safest course is the known course. The teacher does not become bad. They become diminished. And the children in their classroom receive the diminished version of a gift that, in better conditions, would have been extraordinary.

The people who left did not take their gifts with them and bury them. They took them into banks and oil companies and international organisations and the diaspora and private training firms, and those institutions received what the public school system threw away. The bank executive who was built to explain complexity to large groups of people. The NGO programme officer whose ability to build trust in a room would have transformed a staff room culture. The doctor who understands how to make the frightened feel safe. The engineer who can hold fifty variables in his head simultaneously. Nigeria trained these people, partially, at public expense, and then offered them conditions so comprehensively inadequate that keeping them in classrooms was never a serious possibility. And then it built its national education strategy on whoever remained.

There is a thing that Finland did that Nigerian policymakers love to cite in speeches and hate to implement in budgets. Finland decided, explicitly, as a national policy commitment sustained across decades and governments, that teaching would be the most competitive profession in the country. Teacher training programs admit fewer than one in ten applicants. Teachers are paid professional salaries. They are given the autonomy to teach rather than to execute instructions from above. They are trusted with the curriculum in ways that reflect the genuine expert status the profession is accorded. The result is outcomes that the world studies and cannot fully replicate because the replication requires the prior commitment, which is a commitment to treating the teacher as the most important professional in the national project, not in speeches but in salaries and conditions and status and the daily experience of working in a system that acts as though it means what it says about education being a priority.

Singapore made this commitment. South Korea made this commitment. Estonia made this commitment. Every country that has dramatically improved its educational outcomes in the last generation has made some version of this commitment as a precondition for everything else that followed. The sequencing matters. You do not get better teachers by demanding better teaching from poorly compensated people in impossible conditions. You get better teachers by making teaching a profession that capable people choose, and you make it a profession that capable people choose by paying it as though it deserves the people you want in it.

Nigeria has not made this commitment. It has made the speeches. It has written the policy documents. It has produced the National Teachers Policy and the Teacher Professional Development framework and the various iterations of education sector plans that use the vocabulary of reform without deploying the resources that reform requires. The government announced new teacher salaries in 2020. It transmitted a bill to the National Assembly. Former President Buhari signed the Harmonised Retirement Age for Teachers into law in 2022. Five years after the announcement, teachers are still waiting for implementation of a professional salary structure. The pattern is so consistent that it has become predictable: announcement, legislative action, signing, non-implementation, the next announcement. The cycle manages expectations without changing conditions, which is the most sophisticated form of policy inaction because it generates the political credit of reform without incurring its cost.

The cost, in the meantime, is borne by the children. Not the children of the people making these decisions, who are in private schools or schools abroad, insulated from the consequences of the public system’s failure by the economic advantages that make the public system’s failure survivable for their families. The children of the poor. The children in the rural northwest primary school with ninety children and one teacher and no textbooks and a roof that leaks. The children whose only access to quality education is a public system that the people responsible for its quality have arranged their own children’s lives to avoid. That arrangement is the most honest statement available about what Nigeria actually believes about who deserves a good education.

What would it cost to reverse this? To tell the best graduates that teaching is worth choosing? The calculation is available and it is not complicated. Paying all two point three million registered teachers the national minimum wage would require approximately one point nine three trillion naira annually. The current personnel allocation creates a gap of less than three hundred billion naira against that figure. In a country that allocated fifteen point eight trillion naira to debt service in its 2026 budget, the argument that this gap cannot be closed is an argument about will, not capacity. It is possible. It requires choosing education over other allocations in ways that will be politically uncomfortable for the interests currently served by those allocations. It requires state governors to stop treating education budgets as sources of patronage and start treating them as investments in the human capital their states are currently destroying through neglect. It requires the accountability mechanisms that make a governor responsible for the salary arrears of the teachers in his state in the way he is responsible for the road that collapses before the commissioning ceremony.

Beyond the minimum wage, building teaching into a genuine profession of first choice rather than last resort requires a connected architecture of change that is individually simple and collectively transformative. A national salary structure that rewards qualification and experience and creates a career trajectory that a talented twenty-two-year-old can look at and see a life worth choosing. Continuing professional development that is real, funded, and treated as a right rather than an occasional gift. Class size reduction, phased and real, toward ratios where actual teaching is possible. Infrastructure rehabilitation at the scale of the actual deficit. And the cultural shift that follows material change: the treatment of teachers as the professionals the national project depends on, which cannot be decreed but which the material changes would, over time, produce.

In northern Nigeria specifically, these changes carry additional urgency because the stakes are higher and the conditions worse. The communities where teachers are most desperately needed are the communities least able to attract them under current conditions. Rural hardship allowances that are consistently paid rather than promised and withheld. Security provisions for teachers in conflict-affected areas that reflect the actual risk they are being asked to absorb. Female teacher recruitment and support programmes that address the specific barriers to female teacher deployment in communities where her presence would directly increase girls’ attendance. These are not aspirations. They are policy decisions with known costs and known benefits and the only question is whether the people who can make them will.

I grew up watching the best teachers leave. I watched their departure produce the classrooms I am still writing about, the overcrowded, under-resourced, improperly staffed, examination-oriented spaces where Nigerian children are being asked to become the future of a country that has not decided to invest in their present. I watched what fills the space the best ones left: not nothing, because there are still teachers of genuine commitment and capability in Nigerian public schools, doing extraordinary work against conditions designed to prevent it, and they deserve more recognition than they receive. But also: the resigned, the untrained, the poorly supervised, the unpaid and therefore unreliable, the people who are there because they could not find something else, teaching children who deserve the people who found something else.

The best graduates do not become teachers because we told them not to. We told them with a forty-five thousand naira salary. We told them with a classroom of one hundred children and no chalk. We told them with salary arrears and collapsing infrastructure and the absence of professional respect and the presence of the clear, consistent, unmistakable message that in Nigeria, the person who teaches the nation’s children is the person the nation has decided it can afford to disrespect.

They heard us. They made the rational choice the signal demanded. They left.

The children are still there.