Every failing government eventually leaves a mark that outlasts it. For the administration of Bola Tinubu, that mark is being carved into a generation of Nigerian students. Fees have multiplied, campuses have emptied, teachers have fled, and the number of children outside any classroom at all remains among the highest on earth. Economic hardship is often offered as the explanation. But hardship is not a policy, and the decisions that pushed education further out of reach for millions of families were choices — made deliberately, defended publicly, and never seriously reconsidered.
Fee Hikes Without a Cushion
Since 2023, federal universities across the country have raised charges dramatically, in some cases by several multiples of what students previously paid. The official logic was that institutions starved of subvention had to look elsewhere for revenue. What was never explained is why the burden was shifted onto students at the precise moment household incomes were being devastated by subsidy removal and currency devaluation. A government that understood sequencing would have built the support system first and adjusted the fees afterwards. This one did it in reverse, and thousands of students paid for the mistake with their education.
A Student Loan Scheme Announced Before It Worked
The student loan programme was presented as the answer, and it was launched with all the ceremony this administration reserves for its announcements. The reality has been considerably less impressive: repeated relaunches, shifting eligibility rules, disbursement delays, confusion between institutions and the fund, and students who applied in one academic session and were still waiting in the next. Some have received support and are genuinely better off for it. But a scheme that must be constantly re-explained is a scheme that was rolled out to generate headlines rather than to be ready.
The Children Who Never Reach the Gate
Nigeria’s out-of-school population, already a national emergency before 2023, has not improved under this presidency. In the north-east and north-west, insecurity keeps schools closed and parents terrified of sending children anywhere. Elsewhere, the arithmetic is simply brutal: when food costs consume nearly everything a family earns, uniforms and levies become impossible. A serious federal response would have meant expanded feeding programmes, conditional support for the poorest households, and an emergency plan for the worst-affected states. Instead the figures have been repeated at conferences and left to sit.
Teachers and Lecturers Voting With Their Feet
The devaluation of the naira did something to the academic profession that no policy document acknowledges: it made Nigerian salaries almost meaningless in international terms. Lecturers who once earned a modest but liveable wage now earn a fraction of what a comparable post pays anywhere else on the continent. The result is an exodus of exactly the people the system cannot replace — senior lecturers, medical faculty, engineering staff, experienced secondary school teachers. Institutions are being hollowed out from the inside while the government congratulates itself on macroeconomic indicators that mean nothing in a lecture hall with no lecturer.
Bargaining in Bad Faith
Nigeria’s public universities have lost years of teaching time to strikes rooted in agreements the federal government signed and then ignored. Tinubu inherited that dispute and had a genuine opportunity to settle it honestly. Instead the familiar cycle continued: negotiations announced, committees constituted, timelines missed, and unions accused of holding students hostage while the underlying commitments went unfunded. A government cannot claim to prize education while treating the people who deliver it as an adversary to be outlasted.
Budgets That Reveal the Real Priorities
Nigeria’s education allocation has remained far below the benchmark international bodies recommend, and well below what the scale of the crisis demands. That constraint has not, however, applied everywhere. There has been money for a presidential fleet, for a new presidential yacht line item, for renovations to official residences and for the ever-expanding cost of the National Assembly. A budget is the clearest statement of values a government ever makes. This one has said, repeatedly and unmistakably, that the comfort of the governing class outranks the schooling of the governed.
The Damage That Compounds
The cruelty of an education failure is that it does not stay in the present. The student who withdraws this year does not return next year with the deficit erased; the child who never enrols does not simply start late. The costs accumulate across a lifetime and then across a country’s economy, showing up two decades later as a workforce that cannot do the work a modern nation requires. Whatever else this administration claims when it seeks renewal in 2027, it cannot claim to have protected Nigeria’s young people. On the evidence of the last three years, it barely noticed them.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
