Nigeria’s Youth Betrayed: When Education Becomes a Tool of Oppression

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By Lawan Musa Danlami.( Baba Lawan)

November 2025

The tragedy of Nigeria today is not only that millions of young people roam the streets without jobs, but that the system designed to uplift them—education—has been weaponized to keep them down. The children of the masses are confined to underfunded public schools, where leaking roofs, broken desks, and absent teachers are the norm. Meanwhile, the political elite send their children abroad, only to return them into plum government jobs. For the children of the poor, the highest offer is a stipend to serve as political thugs during elections.

This bleak reality echoes the warnings of three radical thinkers. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, once argued that schools are designed as “ideological state apparatuses”—tools to make the poor accept their place in life. In Nigeria, this is obvious: the child of a roadside trader is groomed for obedience and survival, while the child of a senator is groomed for power. Education here does not liberate; it reproduces inequality.

Ivan Illich, the radical critic of schooling, went further. In his book Deschooling Society, he argued that institutionalized education creates false hope. Nigerians know this truth all too well. How many university graduates are wasting away as okada riders, street hawkers, or jobless wanderers? The certificate, once a passport to progress, has become a cruel joke.

And then there is Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, who condemned what he called the “banking model” of schooling—students treated like empty containers, stuffed with facts but denied the power to think critically. This is precisely why our youths are so easily mobilized as political thugs: the system does not teach them to question oppression, only to submit to it.

The Nigerian elite thrives on this arrangement. They want obedient youths, not empowered citizens. They want thugs to secure ballot boxes, not leaders to challenge corruption. They want educated Nigerians only when they are their own children, returning from foreign universities to take over ministries, oil firms, and multinational jobs.

But the cycle is unsustainable. A nation that denies its majority youth population dignity, education, and employment is sowing the seeds of unrest. The #EndSARS protests were just a warning. More will come unless Nigeria confronts this betrayal.

The answer is not just to “fund education” in the old way, but to rethink it. We must design schools that liberate, not indoctrinate; that equip students with skills and critical awareness, not empty certificates. We must create alternatives—community learning hubs, vocational institutes, and civic education programs that prepare youth to lead, not follow.

Nigeria’s future depends on breaking the cycle. If we do not, we will keep producing educated beggars and unemployed graduates—while the political class keeps its children in London, New York, and Dubai. And the children of the poor will keep being recycled as thugs, victims, and statistics.

The question is not whether Nigeria can afford to act. The question is whether Nigeria can survive if it does not.