Aliyu and I became close friends because our first daughters attended the same primary school.We call him Baba Halima.We met recently and I asked about Halima, who should now be in JSS 2.
He told me that his passion had always been to send her to one of the Unity Schools, a preference shared by other family members. But because he considers her too young for boarding school, and believes staying home would help her develop domestic skills and become more rounded, he chose a private school for JSS 1–3. Having already graduated from Quranic school, his plan is to send her to an FGGC or FGC for SS1 when she is more mature.
His attraction to boarding school is not merely academic. He wants Halima to meet children from different ethnic groups, religions and states. He does not want her growing up in an environment where almost everyone shares the same tribe, religion and locality. His own experience of interacting with people from diverse backgrounds, he says, helped him avoid becoming a local champion and shaped relationships and perceptions that have remained valuable throughout his life.
That conversation stayed with me until I encountered the controversy surrounding the concession of King’s College, Lagos, to its old boys’ association. A September 4 Federal Ministry of Education letter confirmed that the 117-year-old school had been concessioned to the King’s College Old Boys Association (KCOBA) under a 35-year Public-Private Partnership arrangement. The government later clarified that it retained legal ownership and regulatory powers, while KCOBA would finance, rehabilitate, operate and maintain the school.
KCOBA has proposed a N100 billion endowment for rehabilitation, teacher training, digital learning and scholarships. Its argument is that decades of underfunding have allowed the school to deteriorate and that alumni can restore its standards without changing its national mission.But parents and workers see another possibility: that a public institution could gradually become inaccessible through higher costs and that staff could lose their public-service status.
Those concerns triggered industrial action and wider protests across Unity Schools. The Federal Government subsequently suspended implementation for two weeks, assured workers that they would not be victimised, and established a seven-member committee to review the outstanding issues. It also said the King’s College arrangement would not be extended to other Federal Unity Colleges.The controversy exposes a deeper question: what exactly makes a Unity School a Unity School?
These schools were established as instruments of national integration. Their value goes beyond classrooms and laboratories. They provide an environment where Nigerian children from different regions, religions, ethnicities and social backgrounds encounter one another. Education theorists such as Émile Durkheim emphasised education’s role in creating a shared social identity, while Gordon Allport’s contact hypothesis explains how meaningful interaction between different groups can reduce prejudice under the right conditions.
Nigeria’s own experience with Unity Schools demonstrates why their social function matters. For many alumni, the friendships, networks and cross-cultural understanding acquired there become lifelong assets.
This is why the FGC Kano controversy is also important.
In April, the Federal Government launched an N8.5 billion PPP project involving new facilities and renovation at Federal Government College, Kano, under a land-swap model. About 30–33 hectares of school land were allocated to a private developer, Pluck Global Construction Company, in exchange for infrastructure. The affected land includes important school facilities and land reserved for future development.
The government says the arrangement is intended to address infrastructure deficits without imposing the entire financial burden on the public purse. Alumni, however, have protested, arguing that valuable educational land should not be exchanged for infrastructure and warning about the long-term implications for the school’s identity and expansion.The King’s College and Kano cases are different, but they raise the same fundamental question: how should Nigeria modernise public schools without weakening the public character that makes them valuable?
There are alternatives. Government can retain ownership and responsibility for admissions, curriculum, fees and public-service employment while allowing private partners to build and maintain infrastructure. Alumni can establish endowment funds and trusts, as old students have done in several institutions, without taking control of school assets. Management contracts can include fee caps, performance requirements, job protection and termination clauses where standards are not met.
The objective should be to mobilise private and alumni resources without transferring the social purpose of public education to commercial interests.Most families already have access to expensive private and faith-based schools. What Unity Schools offer that many of those schools cannot easily reproduce is national diversity at a relatively affordable cost. If a Unity School becomes an expensive elite institution, its facilities may improve, but its distinctive social purpose could diminish.
There is therefore nothing inherently special about a school simply because it carries the name King’s College, Federal Government College or Federal Government Girls’ College. Its special character comes from the combination of public ownership, affordability, diversity, national representation and reasonably good education.If affordability disappears, the bridge across social and economic classes disappears with it. If diversity disappears, the national-integration purpose disappears.And if public access disappears, we are left with another elite school competing with hundreds of private institutions that already exist.
As I reflect on all this, I keep thinking about Baba Halima and his dream for his daughter. He is not looking for luxury. He wants a school where Halima can receive a decent education, meet Nigerians from different backgrounds, develop confidence and understand the heterogeneous society she will one day lead.That is the real promise of Unity Schools.Whatever model Nigeria adopts to rehabilitate them, affordability and diversity must not become casualties of modernisation. Otherwise, we may preserve the buildings and the names while losing the very reason the schools were created.
*Bagudu Mohammed* is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media. It offers evidence-based analysis and real-life insights as a credible alternative to groupthink, convenient narratives, and echo chambers. The platform explores a wide range of issues, including politics, society, relationships, governance, and contemporary trends.
Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575
