Every unmet need in a young person’s life is a vacancy. And vacancies do not stay open for long. If government does not fill the vacancy for guidance, belonging, income, and a believable future, somebody else eventually will, and that somebody rarely has the young person’s interest at heart.
This is the part of the education argument that budget speeches never reach. A ministry can build a thousand classrooms and still lose, because the classroom is not the only institution recruiting a teenager’s loyalty. The cult recruiting on a tertiary campus is recruiting. The fraud syndicate operating out of a rented apartment is recruiting. An insurgent network patient enough to wait years for a frustrated candidate is recruiting. The political godfather looking for boys to man a polling unit is recruiting. Government is not the only actor in the room. It is simply the actor most likely to arrive last, if it shows up at all.
Ogun State’s classrooms do not all operate on the same terms. Some have books, electricity, laboratories and teachers equipped to make instruction meaningful. Others are contending with leaking roofs, absent staff and a syllabus taught from memory because there is nothing else to teach it from. That gap did not appear by accident. It is the sum of decisions about where money, staff and attention are sent, and where they are not.
None of this means a neglected school manufactures a criminal. It does not. Millions of Nigerians raised with almost nothing have built dignified, law-abiding lives, and some of the most damaging people in this country’s history passed through its best classrooms. Deprivation is not destiny. But deprivation is leverage, and leverage is exactly what recruiters of every kind are trained to look for.
This reality sits at the heart of Sustainable Development Goal 4 the global commitment to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Target 4.5 specifically demands the elimination of disparities so that rural children, children from the poorest households, and those in vulnerable situations have the same chance as anyone else. Target 4.4 insists on skills that actually lead to employment and entrepreneurship. Target 4.7 calls for education that builds a culture of peace and non-violence. When a state fails these targets, it does not merely miss a development indicator; it leaves a vacancy that other forces are ready to fill.
The pattern is not unique to Ogun, or even to Nigeria. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel recruited teenagers from the city’s poorest communes places where formal schooling offered little credible path to dignity or income. Escobar and the networks that followed him offered money, motorcycles, status and a sense of belonging that the state and the legitimate economy had failed to provide. Historians record that many of those young men joined because they wanted “to have something, to be someone.” Decades later, Medellín’s libraries, sports programmes, hip-hop schools and targeted education interventions were deliberately designed as competing offers of belonging. The lesson was clear: the state that shows up late loses.
A similar story unfolds in rural Sinaloa. Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán left school early in conditions of extreme poverty and entered the drug trade as a teenager. Mexican cartels continue to recruit adolescents sometimes called pollitos from communities where quality education, skills training and believable livelihoods are weakest. Low schooling, unemployment and a sense that their towns offer “nothing” become the openings cartels exploit. Even when criminal networks later stage visible acts of “philanthropy,” such as temporary schools, they are merely stepping into the vacuum the state left behind.
Closer to home, Sierra Leone offers a harder warning that must be handled carefully. Through the 1970s and 1980s the state allowed secondary enrolment to expand far faster than it could pay teachers or guarantee graduates a job, while the old patronage systems that once funded rural schooling collapsed. Researchers who examined the civil war found a large population of rural, jobless young people with few institutions willing to claim them. Most children who ended up in the Revolutionary United Front were taken by force. That fact must never be minimised. Yet investigators also documented a quieter pattern: some marginalised young people came with less resistance than a functioning state should ever allow, because the group offered structure, status and a version of a future that legitimate institutions had stopped offering. A place does not need a civil war to learn from that. It needs only to notice that the same mechanics a state that quietly stops competing for its own young people can operate at a smaller, quieter scale inside a single local government area.
Nigeria’s own evidence is no less uncomfortable. Internet fraud, popularly known as Yahoo Yahoo, has thrived for two decades not chiefly among the least educated but disproportionately among undergraduates and graduates who did everything a certificate was supposed to guarantee and still could not find work that matched it. Researchers keep tracing its growth back to the same pressure point: the fear of finishing school only to remain idle. In the North, large numbers of out-of-school children, including those in the Almajiri system, have been documented as vulnerable to recruitment by Boko Haram and its offshoots not primarily because of ideology, but because of hunger, lack of skills, social isolation and the absence of any institution offering a credible alternative. Former Almajiri appear among surrendered fighters for the same reason recruiters everywhere look for leverage: unmet need.
This should change how Ogun talks about its own progress. A certificate is not the finish line. It is a ticket to a race a young person can still lose if there is nowhere credible to run once he crosses the classroom’s threshold. SDG 4 is not an abstract United Nations checklist. It is the global recognition that inclusive, quality, relevant education is infrastructure for social stability. When rural schools lack books, electricity, laboratories, trained teachers, counselling, sports and practical skills, the state is not merely under-performing on an education target. It is refusing to compete.
Consider what it means for a young person to spend years hearing that education is the key to his future, only to discover that the key opens very few doors. He attends school, writes examinations and watches the years pass. He sees people with connections find opportunities while his own qualifications remain inside a file. He hears political promises during campaigns and watches them disappear afterwards. He searches for work in an economy that appears to have more requirements than openings. He begins to wonder whether the system has any place for him beyond the moment when his vote, his crowd or his labour is needed.
Not every young person responds to that frustration in the same way. Some build businesses. Some migrate. Some find honest work. Some persevere for years before opportunity finally arrives. But the existence of resilient people should not be used as an excuse to ignore the conditions that make resilience necessary.
There is a point at which exclusion begins to affect not only what a person can earn, but what he believes he is worth. A young man who has spent years being told that his future matters may become vulnerable to anyone who appears willing to prove it. The offer may come as money, a position, protection, a group identity or the promise of becoming somebody in a society that has repeatedly made him feel like nobody. Criminal organisations understand the power of belonging. Extremist groups understand the appeal of grievance. Predatory political networks understand the usefulness of young people who have been denied meaningful participation but are still searching for recognition.
This is why a functioning school matters beyond the examination hall.
A teacher who takes a struggling child seriously may become the first person to tell him that his mind has value beyond the circumstances of his home. A library may introduce him to a world larger than the road leading to his village. A computer may reveal opportunities that do not exist within walking distance. A football field, a journalism club, a science laboratory or a vocational programme may give a teenager a legitimate place to belong, to contribute and to discover that his future does not have to be negotiated through desperation.
These things are not luxuries to be considered after every other need has been satisfied. They are part of what makes education meaningful and part of what SDG 4 actually requires. A school that only prepares children to sit examinations but does little to develop their skills, confidence, curiosity and sense of possibility is leaving part of its responsibility unfinished.
Ogun must begin to look at its educational inequalities with the seriousness they deserve.
The state cannot continue to speak of education only through enrolment figures, examination results and the number of buildings renovated. Those figures matter, but they do not tell the whole story. A school may have a roof and still lack the conditions necessary for effective learning. A community may have a classroom block and still be struggling to retain teachers. A child may be enrolled and still be receiving an education that leaves him poorly prepared for the world beyond school.
The real question is whether the child in the most underserved community has a believable future.
Can he learn in a classroom where the teacher has the support to teach well? Can he access the books, electricity, digital tools and practical learning that his age demands? Can he develop skills that will remain useful when the examination is over? Can he find a pathway into employment, enterprise or further education? Can he look at the institutions around him and believe that they are interested in more than collecting his obedience during elections?
These are not questions that can be answered by ceremonial commissioning alone. They are the practical content of SDG 4. They require government to know which communities are falling behind and why. They require resources to follow educational need rather than political convenience. They require teachers in underserved schools to receive the support necessary to remain effective. They require investment in books, laboratories, electricity, digital access, counselling, sports and practical skills. They require the kind of planning that understands that a child who finishes school without a credible pathway into adulthood may be entering another period of uncertainty rather than a new chapter of opportunity.
They require the people who live in these communities to be treated as participants, not merely beneficiaries. Parents know when a school is failing. Teachers know what their classrooms lack. Young people know what opportunities are missing from their communities. Journalists have a responsibility to ask questions that do not disappear when the cameras leave. Civil society and traditional institutions must be able to scrutinise public commitments and demand evidence of results.
Government must lead this work, but it must also be held accountable for it.
Because neglect has a delayed invoice.
A government can postpone repairing a rural school today and complete its tenure without immediately seeing the consequences. A child can spend years learning in inadequate conditions without making the evening news. A teenager can leave school without employable skills without causing an emergency meeting in government offices. The damage does not always arrive as a crisis. Sometimes it arrives as a quiet accumulation of missed opportunities, abandoned ambitions and young people who have grown accustomed to expecting very little from the institutions that govern them.
Years later, when unemployment rises, when criminal networks expand, when political violence becomes easier to organise, when communities lose confidence in the state, the original neglect may be difficult to trace. The broken classroom will not appear in the headline. The missing textbook will not be counted among the causes. The scholarship that never reached a struggling student will not be remembered when people begin asking why a generation is so vulnerable to manipulation.
But the connection does not have to be direct to matter.
A society does not need to prove that every act of insecurity began in a neglected classroom before it can recognise that educational exclusion creates conditions that deserve urgent attention. It is enough to understand that young people need more than warnings about crime. They need credible alternatives to it. They need institutions that offer them dignity before somebody else offers them power without responsibility.
Ogun cannot afford to treat rural education as a welfare issue that can wait until there is enough money. Education is infrastructure. It is economic preparation. It is social protection. It is part of the long-term work of building a society in which young people can participate meaningfully rather than remain permanently exposed to those who profit from their exclusion. It is also the practical meaning of SDG 4 in a single Nigerian state.
The responsibility is especially important in communities where the quality of opportunity is already shaped by geography. A child should not have to apologise for being born in a village. He should not have to compete against a child with access to resources that his own community has never been given. He should not have to interpret the neglect of his school as evidence that his future is worth less.
And yet, that is what unequal education can quietly communicate. It can tell one child that the world is preparing for his arrival while telling another that he must first overcome the conditions the world has placed in his way.
This is why the discussion must move beyond the language of school improvement and enter the deeper question of social stability. A child who can see a future has something to protect. A young person who can see a legitimate pathway into dignity has less reason to surrender himself to someone else’s pathway. A community that trusts its institutions is less easily persuaded that violence, criminality or political manipulation is the only available route to significance.
None of this is automatic. Education is not a magic shield against crime, and no government can eliminate insecurity simply by building classrooms. But a serious government must understand the conditions within which insecurity grows, and it must refuse to leave young people without the opportunities that make legitimate participation possible.
There is a version of this argument that ends by insisting the neglected child is not a criminal, not a recruit, not a statistic. That much should not even need saying. The harder truth is this: recruiters do not wait for someone to become dangerous before they show interest. They show interest while a young person is still deciding who he is going to become, and they are patient enough to wait years for the answer to go their way.
Escobar’s networks understood this. The cartels that followed El Chapo understood this. The groups that preyed on Sierra Leone’s marginalised youth understood this. The fraud syndicates, cults and insurgent recruiters operating inside Nigeria understand it still.
Ogun cannot out-wait them by doing nothing. It can only out-compete them, by making sure that a young person’s most convincing offer of belonging, income and a future comes from a classroom, a library, a vocational centre or a mentor with the state’s backing, and not from whoever gets there first.
The question was never whether Ogun could afford to invest seriously in its most neglected classrooms.
It is whether Ogun is willing to compete for its own children before someone with worse intentions decides to and whether it is prepared to treat SDG 4 not as a distant global slogan, but as the minimum standard of seriousness a state owes the next generation.
