At first glance, the consistent increase in Nigeria’s annual education budgets might suggest a country earnestly committed to revamping its schools and investing in the minds of future generations. However, behind the glossy headlines of budget announcements lies a stark paradox: despite allocating more money on paper, the quality of education in Nigerian schools remains alarmingly poor. Classrooms are overcrowded, facilities dilapidated, teacher morale low, and student outcomes declining. The problem is not simply a matter of how much is spent, but how and where the money goes, and whether those investments are yielding measurable improvements in learning.
Nigeria’s education sector, spanning from basic to tertiary levels, has for decades been trapped in a cycle of underperformance. The universal expectation is that increased government expenditure should lead to better infrastructure, improved teacher quality, expanded access, and enhanced learning outcomes. Yet, reports from various state and federal school systems suggest that spending trends often bear little or no correlation with the actual progress being made on the ground. This disconnect has led many education stakeholders to ask hard questions about inefficiency, mismanagement, and policy misalignment within the sector.
One of the core problems is that budget allocations in Nigeria are often heavy on recurrent expenditure, particularly salaries and overheads, and light on capital investment. Teachers, who form the backbone of education delivery, are frequently unpaid or underpaid, with many states owing salaries running into months. Where salaries are paid, they are rarely tied to performance or professional development. The result is a demoralised teaching workforce, many of whom are either unmotivated or lack the skills to deliver modern, student-centred instruction. This undermines the value of the money spent.
Beyond salaries, infrastructure in many Nigerian public schools is in shambles. Yet billions of naira earmarked annually for capital projects rarely reach the classrooms where they are most needed. Contract inflation, political patronage, and procurement rackets dominate the process of school construction or renovation. It’s not uncommon to find schools listed in budget documents as having received new classrooms or toilet blocks that either don’t exist or are poorly constructed. This budget opacity and corruption severely limits the impact of funds that should improve learning conditions.
Another dimension to the paradox is that increased spending is rarely aligned with data or actual needs. Education planning in Nigeria is often done in silos, disconnected from empirical evidence or local realities. For instance, in states with low literacy rates or high out-of-school populations, one would expect strategic investments in early childhood education, girl-child enrolment, and teacher recruitment. Instead, funding is sometimes channelled into politically visible but educationally redundant projects. Without a centralised and transparent tracking system that aligns spending with impact, much of the allocated funds vanish into the bureaucratic abyss.
At the policy level, Nigeria suffers from a chronic implementation deficit. While education blueprints like the National Policy on Education and the Universal Basic Education (UBE) Act offer a sound framework for growth, these documents are often left unimplemented or selectively applied. The federal government’s education budget, even when increased, often fails to trickle down to state and local levels where basic education is mostly delivered. States, which have the constitutional responsibility to manage primary and secondary schools, sometimes do not prioritise education at all. Their budgetary allocations fall far below the UNESCO-recommended 15–20% of total government expenditure on education, making the federal allocation nearly ineffective in isolation.
Moreover, donor funds and development partner interventions are sometimes absorbed into the system without proper accountability mechanisms. While international partners such as UNICEF, the World Bank, and the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) inject millions of dollars into Nigeria’s education sector annually, the impact is diluted by poor coordination and fragmented implementation. Without strengthening internal governance structures, even the best-funded initiatives risk yielding marginal returns.
A central but under-discussed component of this paradox is the near-total neglect of learning outcomes. National conversations around education funding tend to focus on access and enrollment; how many children are in school rather than on how much they are actually learning. A 2023 national learning assessment by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) revealed that a staggering number of pupils in primary schools cannot read or solve basic arithmetic problems. Secondary school students fare no better, with mass failure in WAEC and NECO examinations a recurring annual crisis. Without linking expenditure to learning indicators, Nigeria continues to spend more to achieve less.
There’s also a significant inefficiency in how teacher training is handled. Government initiatives such as the National Teachers’ Institute (NTI) and various state training programmes are often disjointed, underfunded, or politically manipulated. Teachers are sometimes sent to workshops that are outdated or irrelevant to the curriculum. Others receive certificates without acquiring any real skills. The ripple effect is a classroom culture that relies heavily on rote learning, outdated methods, and limited engagement, which fails to inspire critical thinking or creativity in students.
Furthermore, the politicisation of education undermines reform. Ministerial and commissioner appointments are frequently doled out as political rewards rather than based on competence or passion for education. This compromises policy continuity and long-term planning. Education reform requires consistency, stakeholder engagement, and vision, all of which are difficult to maintain in a political climate where the average head of a public education agency might not last longer than a single electoral cycle.
In practical terms, if Nigeria is to break free from this paradox, a mindset shift is needed at both federal and state levels. Spending must be targeted, transparent, and monitored with a laser focus on outcomes. Schools must be viewed not just as places to house children during the day, but as critical infrastructure for national development. Capital projects must prioritise quality and need, while teacher recruitment and training should be merit-based and continuous.
Budget processes must also be restructured to include community participation. School-based management committees (SBMCs) and parent-teacher associations (PTAs) should be empowered to track spending at local levels. Civil society organisations, education researchers, and the media must also continue to play a watchdog role to ensure transparency and accountability.
Technology can also be harnessed to monitor disbursement and track impact. Platforms that allow real-time reporting on school conditions, teacher attendance, and student performance can provide data to drive policy. Already, pilot initiatives using mobile reporting tools have shown promise in parts of Kaduna and Edo states. Scaling such innovations nationally could bridge the current information gap that fuels mismanagement.
Ultimately, more money will always be needed to fund education in a populous, developing country like Nigeria. But the question is not how much the government is spending, it is whether that spending is solving problems, building capacity, and changing lives. Until budgeting and implementation are firmly grounded in transparency, accountability, and results, Nigeria’s education sector may continue to sink deeper into crisis despite what the numbers on paper suggest. That is the true cost of the education budget paradox.
