The 2025 northern education crisis: A region’s future held hostage
SB Morgen Intelligence’s map on “The 2025 Northern Education Crisis” paints a grim picture of the future of education in the North, and this hits really close to home; it hits right into my family, to be exact.
My six-year-old nephew is a math genius. He can solve problems that leave adults stunned, his mind working through numbers with a clarity that promises brilliance. Since November, he has been at home. Not because he is unwell, not because his parents have chosen to withdraw him from school, but because he lives in the Northeast of Nigeria, where schools have been shuttered indefinitely. His brilliance is now confined to the four walls of a home that cannot replace the structured learning environment he desperately needs.
This is the reality for thousands of children across Northern Nigeria in 2025.
What began as a precautionary measure following federal intelligence warnings of mass abductions has morphed into an indefinite suspension of education across multiple states. From Sokoto to Yobe, from Kebbi to Bauchi, schools at all levels—primary, secondary, and tertiary—have closed their doors. The 2025 Northern Education Crisis is a calculated erasure of futures, a systematic dismantling of whatever fragile educational infrastructure existed in a region already gasping for breath.
SBM Intelligence’s map tells a story more damning than any words can capture. Entire states marked “INDEFINITE” in bold letters. Sokoto, Kebbi, Niger, Katsina, Kaduna, Bauchi, Gombe, Yobe, and Plateau are all frozen in time, their children forced into an extended limbo while the rest of Nigeria proceeds with learning. The reasons vary by state: banditry, abduction threats, regional insecurity, and intelligence warnings of imminent attacks. The result remains the same: millions of children removed from classrooms with no clear path back to education.
This shutdown is not happening in a region with robust educational indicators. Northern Nigeria has long been the albatross around the neck of Nigeria’s education statistics. While Southern states boast literacy rates above 80%, states like Yobe, Bauchi, and Sokoto struggle with rates below 30%. The Educational Data Bank reveals that out-of-school children in Nigeria number over 18 million, with Northern Nigeria accounting for approximately 70% of this figure. Girl-child education in these states is particularly catastrophic, with some communities recording female enrollment rates as low as 4%.
Now, take these already dire statistics and add months, possibly years, of interrupted learning.
What we are witnessing is an orchestrated annihilation of human capital. Every day these schools remain closed, the North falls further behind. Every week without structured learning widens the chasm between Northern children and their counterparts in other regions. Every month of this shutdown guarantees that an entire generation will emerge semi-literate at best, unemployable, and vulnerable to the very extremism that necessitated the closure of schools in the first place.
The cruelty of this cycle cannot be overstated. Boko Haram, whose name translates roughly to “Western education is forbidden,” has been attacking education in the North since 2009. The Chibok girls, the Dapchi girls, the countless boys kidnapped from schools, and the teachers murdered in classrooms are all part of a sustained campaign against knowledge. And now, in 2025, the Nigerian state has completed what Boko Haram started. The schools are closed. The terrorists didn’t need to burn them down; the government did it for them by turning them into ghost towns to protect the children.
How does a region recover from this? How does Northern Nigeria, already burdened with poverty rates exceeding 70% in some states, climb out of a hole that gets deeper with each passing day? Education has always been the ladder out of poverty, the bridge to opportunity, and the foundation upon which futures are built. That ladder is being sawed off. That bridge is collapsing. That foundation is crumbling.
My nephew’s mathematical genius will not wait for the North to become secure. His brain is developing now, his synapses are forming connections now, and his potential is either being nurtured or wasted now. Multiply him by millions, and you begin to understand the tragedy unfolding. These are children whose dreams are being deferred indefinitely, whose capabilities are being stunted, whose futures are being stolen in real time.
The 2025 Northern Education Crisis is a harbinger of worse things to come. A region that cannot educate its children cannot secure its future. People who remain ignorant are easy to manipulate, easy to radicalise, and easy to control. The North is being set up for decades of dysfunction, and we are watching it happen with the resigned acceptance that has become Nigeria’s default response to tragedy.
We have become a nation comfortable with the abnormal. Comfortable with millions of children out of school. Comfortable with entire states operating in perpetual crisis mode. Comfortable with writing off whole regions as collateral damage in a war we refuse to properly fight.
The silence in Northern classrooms today is the sound of Nigeria’s future dying. My nephew deserves better. The millions like him deserve better. But unless something drastic changes, unless education is prioritized with the same urgency as security threats, unless we recognise that keeping children out of school is itself a national security crisis, then the North is headed toward an abyss from which recovery may be impossible.
The question is no longer whether Northern Nigeria can catch up educationally. The question is whether it will ever get the chance to try.
You must be logged in to post a comment.