Nigeria doesn’t lack education policies. It lacks a destination. What Nigerian should our schools be producing by 2050?

I once heard a fascinating story about Nestlé and coffee in Japan. Japan was historically a tea-drinking nation. Tea wasn’t just another beverage; it was woven into the culture, its rituals and memories. Coffee had no such place. In the 1970s, Nestlé reportedly sought the help of French psychoanalyst and marketing researcher Dr. Clotaire Rapaille to understand why coffee was struggling to gain similar cultural acceptance in Japan.

Rapaille’s insight was simple but profound.

Japanese adults had grown up with tea. Coffee had no childhood imprint, no emotional association, no memories to call upon. So rather than concentrating only on persuading adults to change an already established habit, Nestlé began introducing younger consumers to the flavour of coffee through coffee-flavoured confectionery. Over time, familiarity with the flavour grew, followed by other coffee products as that generation grew older.

The details of this story have acquired some embellishments in popular retelling, but Rapaille’s work with Nestlé in Japan, and the use of coffee-flavoured confectionery to create familiarity among younger consumers, have been documented.

But coffee isn’t really why I am telling this story. The idea behind it is what stays with me:

If you want to create lasting cultural change, sometimes you have to begin with the generation whose culture is still being formed.

And that got me thinking about Nigeria.

What If We Are Trying to Fix Nigeria Too Late?

Almost every conversation about fixing Nigeria revolves around adults. We need better leaders. We need to fight corruption. We need patriotic citizens. We need stronger institutions. We need more entrepreneurs. We need people who respect public property. We need Nigerians who think beyond tribe and religion. We need innovative thinkers. We need citizens who understand that Nigeria belongs to all of us. I agree with all of these. But there is a question we don’t ask often enough: where exactly are these Nigerians supposed to come from?

We somehow expect a 40-year-old Nigerian to suddenly become the ideal citizen after spending the first four decades of his life being shaped by the very society we are complaining about.

Then we try to repair him. We organise seminars, launch orientation campaigns, create agencies, write new laws, change slogans, change governments, fight corruption and preach patriotism. A few years later, we begin another round. Perhaps we are starting too late. Much too late.

If we truly want to alter the future of Nigeria, perhaps our greatest nation-building project should begin with Nigerians whose worldview is still being formed. Our children.

This isn’t an entirely new thought for me. In 2022, I wrote about Children and Our Educational System. At the time, I asked questions about the effectiveness of our National Policy on Education, standards across our schools, the quality of teachers, and who exactly was responsible for safeguarding the future of the Nigerian child.

Four years later, I think my question has become even more fundamental: what Nigerian are we actually trying to produce? Forget the curriculum for a moment. Forget 6-3-3-4, forget 9-3-4, forget the debate over nine or twelve years of compulsory education. Those questions matter, but they come later.

After twelve or more years within the Nigerian education system, what kind of human being should emerge at the other end? What values should have become almost instinctive? And perhaps most importantly, what kind of Nigeria are we preparing that person to build? Until we answer those questions, we may continue changing curricula without necessarily changing education.

The Problem Isn’t the Absence of Policy

In researching this, I discovered something important. Nigeria does not suffer from a shortage of education policies. We have plenty. Our foundational National Policy on Education remains the 6th Edition, issued in 2013. We had Education for Change, a Ministerial Strategic Plan for 2018–2022. Then came Education for Renewed Hope: Roadmap for the Nigerian Education Sector 2024–2027.

Today, the Federal Ministry of Education describes the Nigeria Education Sector Renewal Initiative (NESRI) as its flagship reform agenda. It is organised around six areas: technical and vocational education, STEMM, out-of-school children, girl-child education, data and digitalisation, and education quality assurance. We have revised curricula. History is part of the basic education curriculum. There are initiatives around TVET, teacher development, skills and digital education. And Nigeria now has a National Policy on Non-State Schools covering private, faith-based and other non-government schools.

So it would be unfair, and inaccurate, to say nothing is happening. A lot is happening. My question is different: where is the enduring destination? Ministers change. Governments change. Priorities, programmes and names change, and sometimes the direction changes too.

Consider language policy. Nigeria adopted a National Language Policy in 2022 that promoted mother-tongue instruction in the early years. In November 2025, the National Council on Education discontinued that direction and reaffirmed English as the medium of instruction across the education system. In just three years.

Whether one agrees with the original policy or its reversal is not my point. My concern is what this tells us about continuity. Education is generational; its most important outcomes may take twenty years to become visible. How do you transform a country through education if fundamental directions can change before the first generation affected by them has even completed its education?

So, What Nigerian Are We Trying to Build?

Perhaps what Nigeria needs is not another four-year education programme. We need something closer to a 25-year Nigerian Educational Masterplan. Call it Nigeria Education 2050 if you like, but it should begin with the end in mind: what kind of Nigeria do we want to have in 2050, and what kind of Nigerian must we begin producing today to build it? Then work backwards.

If we want Nigeria to be technologically competitive in 2050, what should a ten-year-old Nigerian understand about technology today?

If we want to become a manufacturing nation, what scientific and technical abilities must our children acquire?

If we want less corruption, what relationship with honesty, accountability, consequences and public property should children grow up with?

If we want better governance, how much should an eighteen-year-old understand about the Constitution, elections, government institutions and the responsibilities of citizenship?

If we want entrepreneurs, why should children spend their formative years being rewarded mainly for reproducing answers supplied by somebody else?

If we want innovators, shouldn’t curiosity, experimentation and even failure become normal parts of learning?

If we want financially responsible adults, shouldn’t our children understand savings, investment, debt, interest, taxation and personal finance long before receiving their first salaries?

And if we genuinely want national unity, how much should a child growing up in Lagos understand about Sokoto? How much should a child in Kano understand about Enugu? How much should every Nigerian child understand about the histories, cultures, triumphs, tragedies and people of the country he or she will someday inherit?

These things shouldn’t happen accidentally.

They should be designed. Deliberately.

When the Classroom Becomes a Nation-Building Strategy

Nigeria would hardly be the first country to think this way.

Consider India. Its Education Commission of 1964–66, commonly known as the Kothari Commission, opened its report on education and national development with a striking declaration:

“The destiny of India is now being shaped in her classrooms.”

The Commission went further, arguing that in a world increasingly shaped by science and technology, education would influence the prosperity, welfare and security of the people. The report explicitly connected education to India’s wider project of national reconstruction. That wasn’t merely a poetic statement about schools. It was a statement about national development. Perhaps the destiny of Nigeria is also being shaped in our classrooms. The troubling question is whether we have decided what we want that destiny to be.

Then consider Singapore.

When Singapore became independent in 1965, it had limited natural resources and faced the enormous task of building both an economy and a cohesive nation. Education was deliberately aligned with the country’s changing economic needs. What is particularly interesting is how Singapore’s own Ministry of Education describes the evolution. From 1965 to 1978, during its industrialisation era, it describes its education system as “Survival-Driven”, focused on building a post-colonial system, social cohesion and technical skills.

As its economy became more capital- and skill-intensive, education shifted towards an “Efficiency-Driven” model. With the emergence of the knowledge economy, it moved towards an ability-based system, and later towards a more student-centred and values-driven approach. Today, the emphasis includes resilience, adaptability and preparation for the future economy. In other words, as the Singapore they wanted to build changed, the capabilities they deliberately sought to develop through education changed with it.

Then there is South Korea.

Korea emerged from the Korean War devastated and poor. Yet over the following decades, investment in education and human capital accompanied its transformation from a low-income economy into an advanced industrial and technological nation. The World Bank describes Korea’s transformation as reflecting sustained investment in education, infrastructure and technology, alongside sound economic management.

Finland followed a different path.

Rather than organising its reforms primarily around industrialisation, Finland’s long-running educational reforms placed strong emphasis on comprehensive schooling, equity and teacher quality. The OECD has documented Finland’s continuing national focus on combining educational quality with equality, building on reforms developed over decades.

India is not Nigeria.

Singapore is not Nigeria.

South Korea is not Nigeria.

Finland certainly isn’t Nigeria.

Their populations, histories, political systems, cultures and economic circumstances are very different from ours. Copying any of them wholesale would be simplistic. But that isn’t the lesson.

The lesson is that serious educational transformation is deliberate, sustained and connected to a country’s wider idea of what it intends to become.

Nigeria must discover its own answer.

Defining the Nigerian Core

This becomes even more important because Nigerian education is no longer one homogeneous system. We have public schools, private schools, Montessori schools, British-curriculum schools, American-curriculum schools, IPC schools, faith-based schools, international schools and countless hybrids somewhere in between.

Interestingly, the Federal Government’s National Policy on Non-State Schools recognises this diversity. Non-state schools are expected to adhere to the national curriculum, while additional subjects and foreign curriculum components are subject to regulatory approval. That tells us something important: we do need national standards. But I don’t believe every school in Nigeria has to teach every child in exactly the same way. Why should they? Innovation requires room to experiment. Montessori schools should be free to build on the strengths of Montessori pedagogy. Schools using Cambridge and other international frameworks should be able to draw from theirs. Public schools should have room to innovate too.

But whatever road a school chooses, there should be a destination that remains unmistakably Nigerian.

I call it the Nigerian Core.

Not simply another list of compulsory subjects, but a clearly defined set of knowledge, competencies, values and capabilities that every Nigerian child should possess at defined stages of development. That should hold whether the child attends a public school in Katsina, a low-cost private school in Ajegunle, a Montessori school in Lagos or an international school in Abuja.

Government defines the destination. Schools can innovate around the route.

What Should a Nigerian Child Become?

Imagine that by age eighteen, every Nigerian who has passed through our education system is able to:

• Communicate clearly in speech and writing
• Reason mathematically and think critically
• Understand basic science
• Understand Nigeria’s history, and how our government and institutions work
• Understand his or her rights, and equally, responsibilities
• Understand personal finance: savings, investment, debt and taxation
• Use technology productively
• Understand artificial intelligence well enough to participate in the economy it is creating
• Distinguish credible information from misinformation
• Solve unfamiliar problems
• Work productively with people from different ethnic, religious and social backgrounds
• Practise at least one practical or economically useful skill
• Understand entrepreneurship and value creation
• Respect the dignity of labour
• Understand that public property belongs to everybody, not nobody

And perhaps most importantly, possess the confidence to ask: Why?

Not disrespectfully. Not rebelliously for rebellion’s sake. But because nations that cannot produce people capable of questioning assumptions will struggle to produce people capable of innovation.

Now imagine defining age-appropriate versions of these outcomes at six, ten, fifteen and eighteen. Suddenly, we aren’t merely counting subjects passed. We are measuring the human being our education system is producing.

But Are Our Children Actually Learning?

This distinction matters.

UNICEF’s September 2026 report, Public Finance for Basic Education in Nigeria, contains numbers that should make us uncomfortable. Drawing on the 2022 national learning assessment, it reports that 49 per cent of Primary 3 learners, 67 per cent of Primary 5 learners and a staggering 86 per cent of JSS2 learners did not reach minimum proficiency in mathematics. Even more troubling, about 30 per cent of learners who reached JSS3 in 2021 lacked foundational reading skills ordinarily expected around Primary 2 and 3.

Think about that for a moment. Children are progressing through the system. But learning is not necessarily progressing with them. That should concern us far more than whether we call our structure 6-3-3-4, 9-3-4 or twelve years of compulsory education. Keeping a child inside a classroom for twelve years cannot, by itself, be the achievement. What matters is what happened to that child during those twelve years. What can she understand? What can he create? What problem can she solve? How has his mind expanded? What can that child do today that he could not do yesterday?

That is education.

You Cannot Build a New Nigerian Without the Teacher

This brings us to another uncomfortable conversation. Who teaches this new Nigerian?

We cannot design an education system around critical thinking, technology, creativity and problem-solving while treating the teacher as an afterthought. Who becomes a teacher in Nigeria? How are teachers selected? How are they trained? How well are they paid? How regularly are they retrained? How technologically competent are they? How do we identify outstanding teachers and reward them?

And how do we make teaching attractive enough that some of our brightest young graduates deliberately choose the profession? Not because every other option failed, but because shaping human beings is one of society’s most consequential callings.

India’s 1986 National Policy on Education captured this powerfully:

“No people can rise above the level of its teachers.”

I wrote something similar in 2022: a teacher’s reward cannot perpetually be postponed to heaven while we expect them to nurture the future here on earth. Four years later, I believe it even more strongly. No serious educational masterplan can treat teachers as an implementation footnote. If we are serious about transforming the Nigerian child, transforming the Nigerian teacher must happen alongside it.

A National Vision Must Outlive Governments

Perhaps this is the most important part of my argument.

A Nigerian Educational Masterplan 2050 cannot belong to a President. It cannot belong to a Minister. It cannot belong to APC, PDP, Labour or whatever political configuration comes next. It must belong to Nigeria.

Developing it should involve federal and state governments, teachers, universities, employers, manufacturers, technology companies, parents, students, private schools, religious organisations, civil society, Nigerians in the diaspora and other critical stakeholders. Let us argue. Let us disagree. Let us interrogate the evidence. Let us learn from countries that have deliberately connected education to national transformation, not to copy them, but to understand what long-term thinking looks like. But eventually, let us agree on something fundamental: this is the Nigerian we want our education system to produce.

Then protect that destination.

A government may discover a better way of getting there. Excellent. A Minister may introduce technology that accelerates the journey. Wonderful. States may experiment with different approaches. Even better. Curricula will inevitably evolve, because the world itself will change. But the destination should not be reinvented every four years.

The Nigeria of 2050 Is Already in the Classroom

This brings me back to that Nestlé story. The lesson isn’t coffee. The lesson is time.

Deep behavioural and cultural change takes time. You don’t always transform deeply ingrained behaviour by confronting it after it has fully formed. Sometimes you start with the foundation.

The Nigerian we desire will not suddenly appear when today’s children become adults. We have to deliberately build that Nigerian while today’s Nigerian is still a child.

If we want honest leaders tomorrow, integrity must become experiential today.

If we want entrepreneurs tomorrow, creativity and initiative must be rewarded today.

If we want citizens who protect public property tomorrow, children must understand today that what belongs to everybody does not belong to nobody.

If we want Nigerians who think beyond tribe tomorrow, their classrooms must expose them today to the history, culture and humanity of Nigerians different from themselves.

If we want technologically sophisticated adults tomorrow, digital fluency cannot remain an extracurricular luxury today.

And if we want citizens capable of questioning bad leadership tomorrow, we cannot spend their childhood punishing them for asking difficult questions today.

Nelson Mandela famously said:

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

I used that same quotation when I wrote about our educational system in 2022. Four years later, my question is this: if education really is that powerful, what exactly are we deliberately using it to change Nigeria into? Not because education alone will solve every Nigerian problem. It won’t. The home matters. Religion matters. Community matters. Culture matters. Economic conditions matter. Leadership matters.

But for twelve to sixteen formative years of a person’s life, one institution has an extraordinary opportunity to influence how that person thinks, reasons, relates with others and understands the world. The school.

Perhaps it is time we stopped seeing education primarily as a Ministry, a budget line, a collection of schools, certificates and examinations. Perhaps we should begin seeing it for what it could be: Nigeria’s longest-term national development strategy.

The question, therefore, is not simply whether Nigeria needs another education policy. It is much more consequential: what kind of Nigerian must we deliberately raise today to create the Nigeria we keep saying we want tomorrow?

Because the Nigeria of 2050 is not waiting somewhere in the future for us to discover it. It is already being formed: in our homes, in our communities, and every morning, in classrooms across this country. The children sitting in those classrooms will become the Nigeria we desire, and will meet tomorrow. The question is whether we will leave that outcome to chance, or finally decide to design it.