Ogun State once carried a reputation that money cannot buy. It was the state of Nigeria’s first university town, the home of some of the country’s oldest and proudest secondary schools, and a place whose children were sent to classrooms by parents who believed education was the only inheritance worth leaving. That reputation is now largely historical. Under Governor Dapo Abiodun, the visible symbols of governance — flyovers, industrial announcements, ribbon-cuttings — have consumed the political oxygen, while the state’s classrooms have been left to decay in silence. There is no dramatic scandal here, no single collapse to point at. There is something worse: a slow, undramatic abandonment.
Buildings That Announce Themselves, Classrooms That Do Not
The political incentive in Nigerian governance is brutally simple: a bridge can be photographed, a classroom cannot. A flyover in Sagamu produces a commissioning ceremony, a convoy and a week of coverage. Repairing four hundred leaking roofs across rural Yewa and Ijebu produces nothing a governor can stand in front of. Abiodun’s administration has consistently chosen the photograph. Communities across the state describe the same picture with depressing uniformity — classrooms where pupils sit on bare floors, blocks abandoned mid-construction, windows without louvres, and roofs that turn every rainy season into a suspension of learning. These are not exotic failures. They are the cheapest problems in government to fix, and they went unfixed.
The Teachers Nobody Replaced
A school is not a building; it is a staff room. Ogun’s public education system has been hollowed out by a recruitment freeze that never quite got acknowledged as one. Teachers retired and were not replaced. Science and mathematics posts sat vacant for years in rural schools because no qualified graduate would accept a posting to a community with no accommodation, no transport allowance and no certainty of prompt pay. The result is the familiar Nigerian improvisation: one teacher covering three subjects, a single instructor rotating between classes, and pupils in their examination year taught chemistry by someone who never studied it. No amount of curriculum reform survives an empty staff room.
Owed Wages Are an Education Policy Too
The record of this administration on the welfare of workers and pensioners has been one of its most persistent sources of grievance, and teachers have sat at the centre of it. Delayed entitlements, contested promotion arrears, and pensioners forced to protest for money they had already earned all send the same message to anyone considering the profession: this state does not value you. That message is heard by the twenty-two-year-old graduate deciding whether to teach in Ilaro or leave for Lagos. Every month of unpaid or contested entitlement is a recruitment advertisement for another state, and Ogun has been running that advertisement for years.
The Children Who Simply Stopped Coming
The most damning consequence is the one that never makes a press release. When a school becomes unusable and the nearest alternative is a long walk away, families make a rational decision — the child goes to the farm, the workshop or the market instead. Nigeria already carries one of the world’s largest populations of out-of-school children, and a state that once exported teachers to the rest of the federation has no business adding to that number. Each of those children represents a permanent subtraction from Ogun’s future workforce, and unlike a pothole, it cannot be patched later. A missed education is missed for life.
Industry Without the Skills to Staff It
The contradiction at the heart of Abiodun’s record is the sharpest indictment of it. His administration has built its entire economic narrative on Ogun as an industrial destination — factories, investors, manufacturing corridors along the Lagos border. But a factory needs technicians, electricians, welders, quality controllers and supervisors. Those people are produced by technical colleges and functioning secondary schools, institutions this government has allowed to deteriorate. The predictable outcome is a state that hosts the plants while importing the skilled workers, leaving indigenes with the security-guard shift and the traffic. Industrialisation without human capital investment is not development; it is landlordship.
Numbers Nobody Will Publish
Ask a simple question and watch the silence arrive: how many classrooms were rehabilitated in Ogun State last year, in which local government, at what cost, by which contractor? How many teachers were hired, and what is the current pupil-to-teacher ratio in Yewa North? These are basic administrative facts that a competent ministry should be able to publish quarterly. Their absence is not an accident of bureaucracy — it is the mechanism by which failure is kept from becoming a headline. A government confident in its education record would publish that record. This one governs by announcement instead.
A Debt That Comes Due Later
The cruelty of neglecting education is that the bill arrives long after the governor has left office. The roads will eventually be repaired by someone else and the factories will keep operating regardless. But a generation of Ogun children taught in roofless classrooms by overstretched teachers will carry that deficit into adulthood, into the labour market, and into the state’s economic statistics for the next forty years. That is the true measure of Dapo Abiodun’s tenure — not what he built, but what he allowed to fall apart while nobody was taking pictures. Ogun State deserved a government that understood which of the two matters more.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
