Classes across more than 100 schools were supposed to resume on Monday, September 14, as Nigeria’s Federal Unity Colleges opened for the first term of the 2026/2027 academic session. Instead, many remained shut. Workers under the Joint Congress of Unions of the Federal Ministry of Education suspended resumption nationwide after the Federal Government’s push to hand over the management of King’s College, Lagos, one of the country’s oldest and most revered schools, to Kings College Lagos Old Boys Association (KCOBA) under a proposed 35-year concession arrangement.
Federal Unity Colleges, also known as Federal Government Colleges, are secondary schools owned and funded by the Federal Government rather than by individual states. They were built to give children from every part of the country, regardless of state of origin, ethnicity, or religion, a shared secondary school experience, admitting students under a quota system weighted toward merit, equal representation of states, and discretionary “catchment” slots. Recent numbers indicate that there are over 115 conventional colleges, alongside dozens of federal technical colleges forming one of the largest single blocs of public secondary education in Nigeria and a visible symbol of the country’s unity after the civil war.
As of this week, the dispute has cooled but not ended. On September 17, the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, and the labour unions reached a two-week truce where workers agreed to suspend their industrial action and allow schools to reopen, while the government agreed to pause implementation of the King’s College concession for two weeks, drop plans to victimise striking workers, withdraw police from the school premises, and set up a seven-member committee to review the arrangement with KCOBA. However, this is more like a ceasefire than a resolution, and it exposes a deeper, longer-running crisis in how Nigeria funds, staffs, and cares for its public schools, the people who attend them, and the people who run them.
The unrest at King’s College has landed on a public education system already under severe strain, particularly at the primary and secondary levels where most Nigerian children are schooled.
Poor welfare for teachers remains a defining feature of that strain. Salary arrears, delayed promotions, weak pension administration, and unattractive allowances remain common complaints among public school teachers across federal and state systems. Strikes over unpaid entitlements are a recurring feature of the academic calendar, and many teachers describe a profession that commands respect in principle but receives little investment in practice.
None of this plays out in the abstract. Every week of disrupted resumption, every unresolved dispute over funding or management, and every classroom staffed by an undertrained or unmotivated teacher translates into lost instructional time for children who will eventually have to compete for university places, jobs, and in a global economy that rewards literacy, numeracy, and technical skill.
Saraya Yaduma, the founder of Mafaku Culture, a non-profit organisation focused on foundational literacy among children in public schools, spoke to Culture Custodian about what happens to students when schools go on strike.
“When they eventually resume, the teachers have to rush the curriculum to catch up. The students end up losing a lot from the lesson plans and curriculum from that particular term,” she said.
Teachers fear that concessioning a federal institution to a private-style entity, however well-intentioned, could sabotage promotions, pensions, postings, and years of accumulated service on the table, at a time when many public school staff already feel that the state has failed them.
All this reflects years of grievances over pay, promotion, job security, and basic classroom conditions that have left Nigeria’s teaching workforce one of the most demoralised in the public service.
Idris Alhassan, a classroom teacher at a government school in Abuja, spoke to Culture Custodian about teachers’ grievances and what a potential privatisation of government schools could mean.
“I have been a teacher since 2011 and I haven’t progressed at all. They keep saying there is no vacancy for promotions. This is stagnation. You cannot claim to prioritise education while you deliberately frustrate the people who deliver it. A demoralised, stagnant teacher cannot give his best to the Nigerian child,” he said.
According to Alhassan, Nigerian teachers do not believe that privatisation of government schools will make conditions better.
“Promotion is the only welfare teachers have, and they won’t even give us that one,” he said.
King’s College, Lagos was established in September 1909 by an Act of the British Parliament, with the land provided by the Oba of Lagos, Eshugbayi Eleko, and the scheme championed by Henry Rawlingson Carr, then Acting Director of Education for the colony. It opened with just ten students on Lagos Island. The founders aimed to offer Nigerian boys a standard of general education comparable to English grammar schools, preparing them for university matriculation and for careers in government, commerce, and the professions, at a time when such opportunities were scarce.
Over more than a century, the college built a reputation few Nigerian schools can match. Its alumni list includes figures who went on to shape public service, diplomacy, business, academia, medicine, engineering, the military, and the judiciary. For generations of Nigerian families, admission into “KC” was treated as a mark of promise for a child’s future, which helps explain why any change to how the school is run has provoked such an intense reaction from old students, staff, parents, and the public alike.
That reputation has been fraying for years. Alumni have long lamented the college’s “dwindling fortunes.” From the government’s perspective, the school’s problems are what the proposed concession is meant to fix. The King’s College Old Boys’ Association has framed its 100 billion Naira endowment plan as a rescue mission for a national monument, not a takeover.
King’s College predates the Unity School system by decades, but it has effectively become the flagship of that system since Federal Government Colleges were expanded after the civil war as instruments of national integration, places where a child from Sokoto could sit beside a child from Rivers State, sharing dormitories, classrooms, and a curriculum designed to dissolve regional and ethnic distance. For much of the past half-century, Unity Schools have carried an outsized share of Nigeria’s aspirations for cohesion, producing citizens rather than just graduates, and offering a relatively affordable route into quality secondary education for families who could not afford elite private schools.
The King’s College concession is less an isolated controversy than a stress test for a wider system already showing cracks: chronic underfunding of basic and secondary education, disputes over privatisation and cost-sharing, a teaching workforce that feels underpaid and undervalued, inconsistent quality control, and a policymaking style that too often surprises the very workers and parents it depends on. The two-week truce announced by Dr Alausa buys time for negotiation, but it does not resolve the deeper question hanging over Nigeria’s public schools, which is whether the state can restore ageing, revered institutions like King’s College without further eroding the welfare, job security and morale of the people who keep them running, or pricing out the ordinary families such schools were originally built to serve.
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