By Lawan Musa Danlami (Baba Lawan)
January 29, 2026
Education has long been celebrated as a pathway to freedom, dignity, and social progress. Political philosophers from Immanuel Kant to John Dewey viewed education as the means through which human beings develop autonomy, reason, and civic responsibility. Yet history also demonstrates that education can be deliberately shaped to produce conformity rather than liberation. The Nigerian experience offers a striking case study of this contradiction: a society in which education once empowered an elite to overthrow colonial domination, but later became a mechanism through which that same elite reproduces economic dependency and political obedience among the masses.
During the colonial period, education functioned as a genuinely emancipatory force for Nigeria’s emerging political class. Scholars such as Toyin Falola and Tekena Tamuno have shown that Western education exposed early nationalists to constitutionalism, political organization, and ideas of self-determination. Access to subsidized schooling and overseas education allowed this elite to develop the intellectual tools necessary to confront British colonial authority. Education sharpened their political consciousness, enabling them to recognize colonialism as a system of domination rather than a natural order. In this sense, education fulfilled what Paulo Freire later described as its humanizing role: it enabled the oppressed to name their reality and act upon it.
However, this liberating power of education did not extend to the wider society after independence. Power changed hands, but the structure of domination largely remained intact. Frantz Fanon’s warning in The Wretched of the Earth becomes relevant here. Fanon argued that post-colonial elites often replace foreign rulers without dismantling the systems that sustain inequality.
In Nigeria, the political class that once used education to free itself gradually transformed education into an instrument for preserving privilege rather than achieving collective emancipation.
Contemporary Nigerian education increasingly emphasizes certification over critical inquiry and obedience over creativity. Students are rewarded for memorization rather than analysis, compliance rather than questioning. Ivan Illich’s distinction between “schooling” and “education” is instructive: schooling conditions individuals to fit into existing hierarchies, while education empowers them to challenge those hierarchies. In Nigeria, the former has largely triumphed over the latter.
The consequence is a deeply troubling paradox. Nigeria produces millions of graduates every year, yet unemployment and underemployment remain widespread. After years of formal education, many young people enter a society with no jobs, no access to capital, and no meaningful role in economic decision-making. Scholars such as Claude Ake and Adebayo Olukoshi have observed that when education is disconnected from productive economic structures, it creates frustration rather than freedom. Graduates become dependent on political patronage, informal survival, or endless waiting.
This condition produces obedience in subtle but powerful ways. An educated but economically trapped population is easier to manage than an ignorant one. Such people are socialized to follow procedures, submit applications, and hope for opportunities that rarely come.
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony helps explain this reality: domination is sustained not only through force, but through consent shaped by institutions such as education. When people are trained to blame themselves for systemic failure, they are less likely to challenge the system itself.
Meanwhile, the political class continues to enjoy the long-term benefits of the education it once received—wealth, influence, networks, and mobility—while presiding over an education system that denies similar empowerment to the majority. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s idea of the “colonization of the mind” is useful here. Even without colonial rule, institutions can reproduce dependency by limiting imagination, economic agency, and political confidence.
Crucially, this form of education does not generate widespread resistance because it fragments awareness. Graduates know enough to function within the system but not enough to question its foundations. Paulo Freire warned that when education becomes a “banking system,” where information is deposited without critical reflection, it domesticates learners rather than liberates them. People learn to adapt to injustice instead of confronting it.
Nigeria’s experience demonstrates that education is not automatically liberating. Its political impact depends on its purpose and structure. When education is separated from economic empowerment, civic power, and critical consciousness, it can deepen inequality while maintaining the illusion of progress. It produces educated obedience rather than informed citizenship.
Power, therefore, does not fear education in name; it fears liberating education. It fears an education that teaches citizens how budgets work, how laws are manipulated, how wealth is extracted, and how accountability is enforced. It fears graduates who possess not only certificates but also independence of thought and means of action. That fear explains why education may be expanded in numbers while being hollowed out in substance.
Nigeria’s tragedy is not the absence of education, but the deliberate containment of its emancipatory potential. Until education once again becomes a tool for critical thought, economic capacity, and civic courage, the classroom will continue to produce subjects instead of citizens—and a society of educated subjects, no matter how credentialed, remains unfree.
Abuja Network News
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