On 5 October, Nigeria will join the world to mark World Teachers Day. There will be matching Ankara in school compounds, glossy speeches in Abuja, an award for a handful of teachers flown in for the cameras, and a communiqué about repositioning the profession to restore dignity. The Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, will speak about professionalising and empowering teachers. The Nigeria Labour Congress President, Joe Ajaero, will remind us that we have perfected the art of praising teachers to high heavens while starving them on earth. Newspapers will carry tributes.
Old students will post faded class photos on WhatsApp and write, “My teacher, my hero.” And on October 6, the music will stop. The teacher in Rivers State who earns forty thousand naira for teaching four subjects across six classes will wake up to the same salary, below the seventy thousand naira national minimum wage. The teacher in Jos with a master’s degree who earns fifteen thousand naira will still wait for an increment that has not come in ten years. The retiree in Oyo State who gave three decades and has waited six years for gratuity will still borrow to treat ulcer. World Teachers Day will end, and the people we celebrated will return to the life we have condemned them to live. The real test of this day, therefore, is not what government says on October 5 but what old students do on October 6.
Every successful Nigerian has a teacher buried in his story. The doctor who charges a million naira for consultation was once taught how to hold a pencil. The governor in a convoy was once flogged for failing to recite multiplication tables. The judge, the bank chief executive, the senator, the technology founder, the professor in Canada, all sat on a cracked bench in a dusty classroom while a poorly paid teacher with no car, no house and no health insurance poured his life into theirs. Where are those students now? For most teachers, the honest answer is nowhere. We have built a culture of brilliant alumni who never return. They build mansions in their villages but leave their primary school without a roof. They donate millions to political parties and churches but cannot raise fifty thousand naira to fix their alma mater’s blackboard. They fly to London for medical checkups but forget the teacher who taught them hygiene is now begging for drugs.
This forgetfulness is not abstract. It is structured into how we treat teachers. Transparency International reports sixty six per cent of education allocation is stolen. The Universal Basic Education Commission revealed two hundred and fifty billion naira in matching grants sitting unutilised in State Universal Basic Education Boards while classrooms collapse. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission is prosecuting a former governor over alleged diversion of five point seven eight billion naira in UBEC funds for civil service salaries, loans and road projects. The House of Representatives queried a fifteen billion naira withdrawal from the UBEC account. The Supreme Court judgement of 2002 placed primary education under states but later policy shifted the burden to local councils. The 2024 judgement affirming autonomy for seven hundred and seventy four local governments now forces councils, many more corrupt than governors as former Governor Chris Ngige admitted, to take full responsibility for salaries. In Abuja, teachers struck for six months because area councils refused to implement the seventy thousand naira minimum wage despite increased allocations. Money was released, money was received, yet teachers were not paid.
Inside this rot is another wound. Too often, union leaders trade the collective pain of teachers for juicy political appointments, board memberships and quiet settlements. Strikes are called, teachers stay home for months without pay, and deals are struck behind closed doors while salaries remain unpaid. The ordinary teacher in Ibarapa, Gashua or Arochukwu bears the cost while gains are measured in positions for leaders, not dignity for members. When a permanent secretary who is an old student wants to help, he meets a system where both government and union profit from the status quo.
The crisis wears a female face and a rural face. Primary and private school teaching is dominated by women, many widows and single mothers, earning fifteen to forty thousand naira with no maternity protection or health cover. They buy chalk, print questions and use personal data to teach. Teachers posted to villages face no accommodation, no hardship allowance, no security, no electricity to charge the phone they use to download lesson notes. So they pay bribes to remain in cities, rural schools stay empty, and we blame them for poor outcomes. UNESCO found over sixty per cent of educators in sub Saharan Africa live with chronic stress, with one in three showing symptoms of anxiety or depression. A teacher who cannot feed her family cannot inspire creativity.
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 for verification year after year, 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. 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 chronic ulcer. We tell young graduates to embrace teaching, yet show them a future of endless verification and half pensions paid in the name of compassion. No profession can survive when its ending is a warning. The cost is national. Over seventy per cent of Nigerian children lack foundational literacy and numeracy. We have between ten point five and eighteen point three million out of school children. The pupil teacher ratio is fifty four to one. UNESCO says we need two hundred and fifty thousand new teachers annually. In Niger State, exits reached forty seven point five per cent. More than five thousand lecturers leave yearly, over two thousand three hundred to the United Kingdom since 2021. At the University of Lagos, one thousand eight hundred of three thousand academics have left, leaving one thousand two hundred to serve fifty thousand students at a ratio of one to sixty against a global benchmark of one to sixteen.
But to balance this account, we must tell the other story. There are students who remembered, and they prove that gratitude can be organised. We see them in alumni associations that have moved beyond painting gates and engraving big names. The Federal Government College and unity schools alumni networks, the Anwar ul Islam, Baptist Academy and CMS Grammar School old students, have renovated staff rooms, endowed health insurance for retired teachers and paid outstanding pensions in small batches. In Ekiti, an association traced all surviving teachers from the nineteen seventies and placed them on a modest monthly stipend. In Ibadan, an old boy who became a pharmacist found his Primary Three teacher selling akara after retirement and rebuilt her house without posting it on social media. Professor Wole Soyinka has funded classroom blocks in honour of his primary school teacher. Former President Goodluck Jonathan, who often recounts being taught without shoes, approved the new retirement age of sixty five and expanded UBEC intervention, the only significant structural improvement in two decades. In Kwara, a serving judge traced his former Islamic Studies teacher, now retired and blind, and has carried his medical bills since 2022. In Lagos, a founder who sold his start up endowed a prize not for best student but for longest serving teacher in his local government, with one million naira and health cover. In the diaspora, Nigerian teachers in the United Kingdom and United States run small foundations supplying chalk, textbooks and solar lamps to their alma maters because they remember what fifteen thousand naira feels like. Some former students now in Houses of Assembly pushed for the National Teachers Service Commission proposal to make salaries a first line charge. It has not passed nationally, but its origin was memory.
These examples are small against a deficit of one hundred and ninety four thousand eight hundred and seventy six teachers rising to two hundred and seventy eight thousand by 2025, against funding of zero point three two to zero point five per cent of gross domestic product against UNESCO’s four to six per cent, against a shortfall of two hundred and ninety billion naira for salaries. But they matter because they prove the problem is not inability but unwillingness. What separates those who forgot from those who remembered is not wealth but perspective. Those who forgot see success as self made. Those who remembered see success as inherited. Finland accepts only the top ten per cent into teaching and pays them like master level professionals. Singapore benchmarks salaries against the private sector and gives one hundred hours of paid development yearly. South Korea calls teachers nation builders. Nigeria can at least pay seventy thousand naira and let them retire without borrowing for drugs.
If World Teachers Day must mean something beyond Ankara and speeches, let us redefine it. Make teachers’ salaries a first line charge through a National Teachers Service Commission, ring fence UBEC funds and punish diversion with the same vigour used for other frauds, automate and pay gratuities and pensions on time to end the death queue, reform union accountability so leaders cannot trade welfare for appointments and private teachers can unionise without fear, provide rural hardship allowances and accommodation, and create a national framework where every secondary and university alumni association adopts at least one public primary school not with a gate but with health insurance, teaching aids and direct support for retirees.
To those old students who remembered, who traced a retired teacher, who paid a bill, who renovated a staff room, who pushed a policy, we say thank you. You have kept faith. To the many more who will post tributes on October 5, we ask a simple question. On October 6, will you go back? Will you visit your primary school teacher? Will you ask about her pension? Because every successful Nigerian is a living testimony that a teacher once did his job, even on an empty stomach. If we cannot return to honour them, we should at least return to pay them.
Fẹ́mi Akínṣọlá is a public affairs analyst and development writer.
