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A disturbing video from a public primary school in Ibiaku Itam in Itu Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State recently surfaced on social media. The footage showed a classroom in ruins. The walls appeared worn out and tired with age. The windows hung loosely on rusted hinges. The roof sagged dangerously toward collapse and the floor was cracked and uneven. Inside that room, children were trying to learn. Only four functional dual desks could be seen in the classroom. Four pupils squeezed themselves onto desks designed for two. Several children sat directly on the bare floor, hunched over their exercise books. Some lay flat on their stomachs as they struggled to write. Others balanced themselves on broken planks that once passed for classroom furniture. Their teacher, without a table, perched awkwardly on a small stool while attempting to conduct a lesson. The scene looked like a forgotten village settlement abandoned to the ruins of time by the state decades ago.
But, the school isn’t located in the brackish waters of the Niger Delta or in a remote village.
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According to PREMIUM TIMES which ran a report titled, “Akwa Ibom’s Paradox: Luxury SUVs for ex-officials while pupils sit on floors”, the school is located within Uyo, the capital city of Akwa Ibom, a state whose wealth flows from crude oil and which often prides itself of glittering hotels, expansive flyovers, and modern government buildings. But inside that classroom, children were writing on the floor. The scene is not merely embarrassing. It is devastating. It represents the quiet face of a national emergency that Nigeria has chosen not to confront.
Public schools across the country are collapsing in slow motion. Roofs leak when the rains arrive. Desks are broken or entirely absent. Teachers are poorly trained, poorly paid, and frequently overwhelmed. Libraries do not exist in many schools. Laboratories are little more than fantasies. Toilets are unusable or nonexistent. In some schools pupils bring plastic chairs from home. In others they bring nothing at all and simply sit on the ground. For millions of Nigerian children, who the governors of the country have consistently described as “the leaders of tomorrow”, this has become the meaning of education.
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The future is literally learning from the floor.
This tragedy did not occur suddenly. It has been carefully produced by the choices of those who govern the country. The neglect of public schools in Nigeria cannot simply be explained by incompetence or lack of resources. It reflects something deeper and far more troubling. It reflects the silent construction of a two-tier educational order in which one type of education is reserved for the rich while another inferior system is left for the poor. The children of the political class do not attend public schools. Neither do the children of senior civil servants, contractors, oil executives, or legislators. Their children attend expensive private schools in Abuja, Lagos, Uyo, Port Harcourt, and Ibadan. Many are sent abroad to Britain, Canada, or the United States even before they become teenagers. In those schools the classrooms are air conditioned. Laboratories are fully equipped. Libraries are stocked with books and digital resources. Teachers are well trained and closely supervised. Students have access to computers, sports facilities, and international curricula that prepare them for global opportunities.
They are being educated to lead the future.
Meanwhile, the children sitting on the floor in Ibiaku Itam are being prepared for something very different. They are being prepared for a life of limitation. Public schools have gradually become holding centres for the children of the poor. These schools are no longer structured to produce citizens who can compete confidently in a modern knowledge economy. Instead they quietly reproduce a social order in which the majority remain trapped at the margins of power. The children lying on classroom floors today will likely grow into the domestic workers, drivers, cleaners, security guards, and informal labourers of tomorrow. Their labour will sustain the comfort of the elite whose own children studied robotics, coding, international politics, and advanced sciences in well funded private schools.
This arrangement is quietly creating an apartheid system.
This is not the apartheid of race. It is the apartheid of class. In one Nigeria, children study with tablets, laptops, and interactive boards in climate controlled classrooms. In another Nigeria, children write from the bare floor, their exercise books spread across cracked floors. The distance between these two worlds grows wider each year, quietly hardening into a social order that reproduces privilege for a few and limitation for many. What appears on the surface as neglect is in truth a structure that separates the futures of children long before they become adults. The irony is that the political class never tires of praising education in public speeches. They speak solemnly of its importance as the foundation of national development, yet they remain unmoved when confronted with videos that expose the disturbing conditions of public schools. During election seasons they commission new school buildings, promise digital classrooms, and announce programmes of free education. Budget speeches are filled with impressive figures and declarations of commitment. The reality inside classrooms such as the one in Ibiaku Itam tells a very different story, revealing a system where grand promises coexist comfortably with quiet abandonment.
The system endures precisely because those who preside over it have no stake in its survival. The children of governors, legislators, senior civil servants, and contractors do not sit in these collapsing classrooms. They do not compete for broken desks or lie on dusty floors to write their lessons. Their children attend carefully insulated private schools in Nigeria or elite institutions abroad where the quality of education is guaranteed and the future is carefully prepared. Having exited the public system, the political class feels no urgency to repair it. Public schools have become spaces reserved for other people’s children, distant from the everyday lives of those who make policy and control budgets. In such circumstances neglect becomes easy, indifference becomes routine, and decay becomes permanent. A system that no longer educates the children of the powerful quickly loses the attention of power itself. In many countries the quality of public schools improves precisely because the children of political leaders attend them. When leaders have a personal stake in public education they are compelled to fix it. Nigeria presents the opposite example. The ruling elite have effectively exited public education altogether. Once they left the system, it was quietly abandoned. Public schools were reduced to warehouses for the children of the poor.
The video from Ibiaku Itam exposes the moral consequences of that abandonment. What it reveals is the quiet humiliation of a nation failing its youngest citizens. There’s a disturbing tragedy here that is at once psychological that can’t be overlooked. Children who grow up learning in such environments internalise the message that society does not value them. They absorb the idea that they are invisible and that their futures are negotiable. Education is meant to do the opposite. It should affirm the dignity and potential of every child. It should expand imagination and ambition and give young people the tools to transform their circumstances. But when a child must lie on the floor to write a sentence, the lesson that is learned is something else entirely. That lesson teaches submission.
Nigeria frequently speaks about insecurity, unemployment, and youth frustration as though these crises appeared out of thin air. Here’s the truth: the seeds of these problems are planted in classrooms like the one in Ibiaku Itam. When a nation neglects the education of millions of children it quietly manufactures the conditions for its own instability. We can add another truth: no country builds future prosperity on the foundation of abandoned schools.
The deeper tragedy is that Nigeria has the resources to do better. Oil revenues have flowed for decades. State governments build flyovers, luxury conference centres, and lavish government lodges. Political office holders move around in convoys of expensive vehicles. But the classroom floor continues to serve as the desk of the poor. The video from Ibiaku Itam should not merely provoke temporary outrage on social media. It should force a national reckoning. Nigerians must confront a difficult truth.
The collapse of public education in the country is not accidental. It is structural. It is the silent mechanism through which inequality reproduces itself across generations. Until this structure is dismantled, classrooms like the one in Ibiaku Itam will continue to exist across Nigeria. Every child forced to write from the floor will carry the burden of a country that has already decided how far that child is allowed to rise.
A country that abandons its schools eventually abandons its future.
Nigeria is already walking that road.
Abdul Mahmud, a human rights lawyer, writes from Abuja.
