An education consultant has called for the removal of Nigeria’s education minister, Tunji Alausa, arguing that the country doesn’t have an education system at all, just a schooling system wearing its clothes.
Peter Piper made the case on Breakfast Central, a News Central TV morning programme, during a July 14 discussion on the rising cost of education in Nigeria.
The argument
Piper’s core claim is a distinction: schooling is attendance, certification and timetables; education is equipping people to solve the problems actually in front of them. Nigeria, in his view, does the first and calls it the second. “We need to stop schooling and start educating,” he said.
His verdict on Alausa was blunt that the minister has brought nothing revolutionary to the role and hasn’t broken from the thinking of his predecessors.
He also argued that curriculum design has the process backwards. A curriculum, he said, should be built from a country’s actual challenges rather than imagined in the abstract. By his reckoning, the failure runs across the board: universities, polytechnics, monotechnics, colleges of education and secondary schools are all schools, none of them places of education.
Context on Alausa
Tinubu appointed Alausa education minister on October 23, 2024. He previously served as minister of state for health and social welfare.
Worth noting
Piper didn’t set out an alternative model during the interview. The critique is a diagnosis without a prescription which is both its weakness and, arguably, the point he’s making: he’s arguing the sector needs to sit down and define its purpose before designing anything.
His frustration isn’t isolated. A number of Nigerian education stakeholders have made versions of the same argument that the country’s institutions are structurally misaligned with what a modern economy and the country’s development goals actually demand. But it’s worth being precise: this is one consultant’s call on one programme, not an organised campaign for the minister’s removal.
