In 1965 the best secondary schools in Nigeria were public. King's College Lagos, Queen's College Yaba, Government College Ibadan, Government College Umuahia, Barewa College Zaria, Federal Government Colleges (Unity Schools) from 1973, the state-owned grammar schools, the missionary schools that had just been nationalised in the East after the civil war — these produced the federal civil service, the army officer corps, the medical schools, the engineering faculties, and the political class of the First, Second and Third Republics. Tuition was a token. Boarding was subsidised. The teachers were career professionals on a national salary scale. A child of a railway clerk and a child of a permanent secretary sat in the same classroom and wrote the same WAEC.
That system was systematically destroyed over the following four decades, and the destruction has a documentable timeline. The Udoji Award of 1974 doubled public-sector wages overnight but left education capital budgets flat, so teacher salaries became unaffordable in real terms within two years. The Ali Must Go crisis of 1978 marked the first generalised state retreat from university subsidy. The Structural Adjustment Programme of 1986 introduced 'cost recovery' in tertiary education and froze federal teacher recruitment. The chronic ASUU strikes from 1988 onwards — 17 nationwide stoppages totalling well over 1,800 cumulative days between 1988 and 2024 — wrecked the academic calendar of every federal university. Teacher salaries at the federal secondary tier fell from roughly 3.2x GDP-per-capita in 1975 to under 0.9x by 2000, and have not recovered. By the 2010s the average federal classroom had 62 pupils; the average Lagos state primary classroom had 74; UBE data showed roughly 20 million out-of-school children by 2022, the highest absolute number in the world.
Into that vacuum poured the private sector, in three distinct waves.
Wave 1 — the private secondary school (1985–2000). Pioneered by Corona (founded 1955 but expanded after SAP), Atlantic Hall (1989), Greensprings (1985), Grange (founded 1958, restructured 1990s), Lekki British International School, The Vale, British International School Lagos, Day Waterman College, Loyola Jesuit, Whitesands, Christ The Redeemer's chain, Chrisland, Caleb International and dozens of others. By 2010 Lagos alone had over 18,000 registered private schools at primary and secondary level, against roughly 1,600 public schools. Annual fees ran from ₦80,000 at the bottom of the market to ₦8m+ at the top.
Wave 2 — the low-cost private school (1995–present). Bridge International, Omega Schools, hundreds of thousands of unregistered single-proprietor 'private schools' charging ₦5,000–₦25,000 a term in Mushin, Ajegunle, Idi-Araba, Sabon Gari Kano, Aba and the FCT satellite towns. World Bank surveys (2015, 2019) found that in some Lagos LGAs, over 70% of primary-school enrolment was already in private schools — including the poorest deciles, who were paying for private school because the public school was *de facto* closed.
Wave 3 — the private university (1999–present). The Babangida-era ban on private universities was lifted in 1999 by the Obasanjo administration. Babcock, Madonna, Igbinedion, Bowen, Covenant (2002), Redeemer's, Pan-Atlantic, Afe Babalola (ABUAD), Nile, Baze, American University of Nigeria Yola. By 2024 the NUC had licensed 149 private universities, against 50 federal and 63 state. Tuition ran from ₦600,000/year at the bottom to ₦8m+ at the top, against ₦60,000–₦200,000 for federal institutions. The private universities did not strike. That alone — the simple fact of a guaranteed four-year academic calendar — was, for the families who could pay, worth the entire premium.
The consequence is a two-tier republic. The federal minister whose own children attend Greensprings or Loyola Jesuit and finish at Covenant or AUN supervises a public system her own children would never enter. The senator who shouts on the floor about ASUU strikes has his daughter at Babcock. The class reproduction that the unity schools of 1973 were explicitly designed to prevent has been re-installed by fee structure rather than by law. Roughly 42% of Nigerian children are now in private education at primary level (NBS 2022) — a share larger than that of any other African country, and larger than that of most of Asia.
It connects, finally, to the Subject They Erased, to JAMB 1978, to the Almajiri system, and to the wealth story: a country whose middle class spends an estimated 18–24% of household income on private school fees because the public school no longer functions is a country whose savings rate, mortgage market, pension book and consumption tax base are all permanently smaller than they should be. The private schools and universities are not the disease. They are the symptom — and the prosthetic — of a public-education collapse the state has not corrected and largely no longer talks about.
Figure 1
Primary enrolment by ownership, 1990–2024 (millions of pupils)
Public-school enrolment stalled in 2010. The private share has grown every year since — even at the bottom of the income distribution.