By Adamu Lawal Toro
The Nigerian Union of Teachers did not say anything Nigerians have not long suspected when it warned this week, at the launch of its “GoPublicFund Education Campaign” in Kano, that inadequate funding and poor teacher welfare are driving down education standards and swelling the ranks of out-of-school children. What the union did do was put a name to a crisis that governments at every level have learned to discuss in the passive voice, as though funding gaps simply happen rather than being chosen, budget line by budget line, year after year.
The numbers behind the NUT’s alarm are not new, but they bear repeating precisely because familiarity has dulled their shock value. UNESCO has recommended since 1990 that countries commit 15 to 20 percent of national budget to education. Nigeria has never come close. Federal allocations have hovered between 5 and 8 percent for most of the past decade, falling as low as 5.47 percent in 2025, down from 10.75 percent in 2015. UNICEF puts Nigeria’s out-of-school population at roughly 18.5 million children, about 15 percent of the entire global total, the largest such population of any country on earth. Only 36 percent of Nigerian primary pupils achieve minimum proficiency in literacy and numeracy, unchanged since 2019 despite rising nominal budgets, and roughly half what Kenya and South Africa manage. Bigger numbers on paper have not translated into a better-educated child in the classroom.
Set against this backdrop, the controversy over the 2026 federal budget’s palace allocations reads less like an isolated scandal and more like a symptom. Public accountability group Tracka’s review found N22.15 billion earmarked for the construction, renovation and furnishing of 106 royal palace buildings across the country, spread across dozens of federal agencies with no statutory mandate to construct palaces at all. Eleven of those projects, worth N5.85 billion, have no identifiable location, meaning no one can confirm where the money actually went. Alongside them sat a further N8 billion for the construction and equipping of churches and mosques. As one political analyst put it, government resources were being routed into architecture and ceremony at a moment when education and health were begging for attention.
This is where the question becomes unavoidable: is governance simply about building roads, bridges and palaces, the kind of edifice a governor can be photographed commissioning, or is it about the harder, slower work of building human capability? A palace is visible the day it is finished. A well-funded classroom, a properly resourced teacher, a digital learning tool that helps a rural child catch up to her urban counterpart, these take years to show results and rarely produce a ribbon to cut. It is not hard to see why a political culture built around visible legacy projects gravitates toward the palace and away from the classroom, even though the palace does almost nothing to move a state’s Human Development Index and the classroom, over a generation, does almost everything.
What makes this priority complex more troubling is that the tools to fix it are neither exotic nor especially expensive by the standards of a N22 billion palace budget. Digital learning platforms, offline-capable tablets loaded with curriculum content, SMS-based literacy programmes for out-of-school adolescents, remote teacher training for underserved local governments, all of these exist, are proven elsewhere on the continent, and cost a fraction of what several states currently spend on traditional institution buildings and ceremonial infrastructure. The problem has never really been a shortage of solutions. It has been a shortage of political will to fund solutions that do not come with a foundation-stone photo opportunity.
Kaduna State offers a useful, if imperfect, counter-example. Rather than treating its out-of-school children crisis as an abstract national statistic to be cited in speeches, the state has invested in actually knowing who those children are, where they live and why they are out of school, groundwork that has to precede any serious intervention, whether that is a new school, a cash transfer, or a digital catch-up programme. It is unglamorous work. It does not produce a commissioning ceremony. But it is the only kind of work that can tell a government whether its education spending, whatever the amount, is actually reaching the children who need it. Analysis by ICIR found Kaduna among only 17 states that met or exceeded the UNESCO benchmark in 2025, and among the states projected to allocate a quarter or more of its 2026 budget to education. That Kaduna is simultaneously investing in vocational training infrastructure and in the granular data work of identifying out-of-school children suggests the state understands something many of its peers have not yet grasped: infrastructure and human capital are not competing priorities to be traded off against each other, but two halves of the same development strategy.
Most states have not made that connection. For every Kaduna quietly building a data system to track vulnerable children, there are several states that would rather commission a new secretariat or renovate a traditional ruler’s palace, projects that photograph well and generate none of the political friction that comes with confronting why a state’s own children are not in school. This is not a uniquely Nigerian temptation; politicians everywhere prefer the visible over the invisible. But few countries can afford that preference less than Nigeria can, with the largest out-of-school population on the planet and a workforce that will define the size of the West African economy for the next half century.
The NUT’s campaign is right to demand more funding. But funding alone will not solve a crisis rooted in a governance culture that still measures success by what can be seen from the road rather than what a Human Development Index actually captures. Until state and federal governments treat a functioning classroom with the same urgency they reserve for a palace commissioning, Nigeria’s education numbers will keep moving in the wrong direction, no matter how large the next budget line reads on paper.
Toro wrote from Bauchi