In every Nigerian community, there is a familiar figure. He is the man who taught your father how to write his name, the woman who stayed after school to coach your sister for common entrance, the neighbour who still marks exercise books at night by lantern light after thirty years in the classroom. We call them uncle and aunty, we quote them in speeches on World Teachers Day, and then we abandon them to a life of quiet misery. Nigeria loves to celebrate teachers in rhetoric and punish them in reality, and that contradiction is now tearing the soul out of our education system.
Nigeria is not merely failing its teachers. It is breaking them. We talk about classrooms without roofs, blackboards without chalk and pupils who cannot read, but we rarely talk about the human being standing in front of that blackboard, rising before dawn, walking miles to an overcrowded class and returning home to a poverty so grinding it does not just empty his wallet but hollows his soul. There is a quiet tragedy unfolding in our schools and it has nothing to do with curriculum. It is the slow, unacknowledged collapse of the teacher himself.
The evidence is no longer anecdotal. A 2024 UNESCO report found over sixty per cent of educators in sub Saharan Africa live with chronic stress, while one in three shows symptoms of anxiety or depression. In Nigeria and Ghana, unions have warned that exhaustion, low pay and unrelenting strain are pushing colleagues to breakdown and in some cases to suicide. The Lagos chapter of the Nigeria Union of Teachers has spoken about stress that goes unacknowledged, about teachers grappling daily with overcrowded rooms, no teaching aids and a cost of living that makes their salary worthless. A teacher who cannot feed his family cannot pour creativity into a lesson. A teacher haunted by debt cannot inspire hope in a child.
The crisis wears a female face. Primary and private school teaching is dominated by women, many widows and single mothers, who bear the sharpest edge of this neglect. They receive fifteen thousand naira a month, no maternity protection, no health cover, and are expected to be both breadwinner and caregiver.
The state’s response has been a masterclass in hollow theatre. On World Teachers Day in October 2025, the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, declared that the Federal Government was driving a clear agenda to reposition the profession and restore dignity. The words were polished, the sentiment noble, the timing perfect for the cameras. In that same period, primary school teachers in Abuja, the seat of federal power, were on strike for months because area councils refused to implement the seventy thousand naira minimum wage despite increased allocations. Some received only a fraction. The NUT reported a deficit of 194,876 teachers in public schools, a figure that rose to 278,000 by 2025. Apart from the new retirement age of sixty five, implemented by only twenty two states and the FCT, most incentives remain on paper. Announce with fanfare, do nothing.
That betrayal is deepened by those who claim to speak for teachers. Too often, union leaders have traded the collective pain of teachers for juicy political appointments, board memberships and quiet settlements with government. Strikes are called, teachers stay home for months without pay, and deals are struck behind closed doors while the minimum wage remains unpaid. The ordinary teacher in Ibarapa, Gashua or Arochukwu bears the cost, while gains are measured in positions for leaders, not dignity for members.
There are two different betrayals. Public school teachers suffer the tyranny of government: delayed minimum wage, diverted allocations and unpaid pensions. Private school teachers suffer lawlessness: no contract, no minimum wage enforcement, no right to unionise. In Jos, teachers with master’s degrees earn ten to twenty five thousand naira and may not see an increment for five to ten years. One teacher with fifteen years experience earns fifteen thousand naira, has a wife and three children and works on construction sites at weekends. If not, he says, my family will starve. In Rivers State, a teacher with sixteen years experience, teaching four subjects across six classes, earns forty thousand naira, below minimum wage. These are not exceptions. They are the norm.
Nowhere is neglect more brutal than in rural postings. Teachers sent to villages face no accommodation, no hardship allowance, no security, no electricity to charge the phone they must use to download lesson notes. So they pay bribes to stay in the city, rural schools remain empty, and we blame them for poor outcomes.
The cruelty is compounded by irony. Teachers are expected to be emotional anchors for pupils while their own needs are treated as irrelevant. They are counsellors, mediators, first responders to trauma, absorbing pain while their own festers. A former housemistress wrote: “I have watched colleagues smile through grief, mark papers through the night, and show up for children even when they couldn’t show up for themselves. They were the calm in everyone’s storm, until they quietly broke down from the weight of holding everyone else up.”
When teachers break, the system produces broken futures. Over seventy per cent of Nigerian children lack foundational literacy and numeracy. Over 5,000 lecturers leave universities yearly, with more than 2,300 relocating to the United Kingdom since 2021. At the University of Lagos, 1,800 of 3,000 academics have left, leaving 1,200 to serve over 50,000 students. The ratio has ballooned to 1 to 60 against a global benchmark of 1 to 16.
Retirement is where the betrayal becomes final. After thirty five years of chalk dust, teachers join a death queue under the sun, carrying files from office to office, borrowing to treat illness, while gratuity remains unpaid for three, five, even six years. In Oyo State, hundreds of retired primary school teachers are trapped in poverty, ill health and neglect. One retiree, Ademola Salami, who gave more than three decades, still waits for his gratuity six years after retirement, his pension vanishing instantly to service debts, borrowing to treat a chronic ulcer. We tell young graduates to embrace teaching, yet show them a future of endless verification exercises and half pensions. No profession can survive when its ending is a warning.
The solutions are not mysterious. First, benchmark salaries against minimum wage and enforce it in private schools. Second, integrate mental health support for every educator. Third, grant rural hardship allowances and decent accommodation, as Ghana and Rwanda have done. Fourth, make teachers’ salaries a first line charge through a National Teachers Service Commission. Fifth, automate and pay gratuities and pensions on time to end the death queue. Sixth, reform union accountability so leaders cannot trade welfare for appointments, and private teachers can unionise without fear.
The teachers of Nigeria have not failed their country. Their country has failed them. The broken chalkboards are a metaphor. The broken souls behind them are not. They are real, they are suffering, and they are waiting for a nation that has looked the other way to finally see them.
Fẹ́mi Akínṣọlá is a public affairs analyst and development writer
