Despite allocating ₦275.40 billion, 17 per cent of its ₦1.669 trillion 2026 budget to education, Ogun State has yet to close the opportunity gap that separates children whose families can buy quality schooling from those who cannot, leaving public-school students at a lasting disadvantage from primary school through the job market.
That gap is the real education story. It begins before either child understands what inequality means, follows them through secondary school and university, and arrives with them at the labour market, the new examination hall. The street has given it a name: Nepo versus Lapo.
The Nepo student is the “Omo olowo niyen”: the child whose family can pay for a private school, extra lessons, a laptop, data, and excursions or specialized coaching whenever the need arises. The Lapo student is the deliberately comic “Gbomule lantern”: the child from a household that stretches salaries, joins cooperatives, borrows when necessary, and keeps education going through sacrifice.
The joke is about money. The issue is opportunity. And the central question is brutally simple: has Ogun built a public education system strong enough to stop family income from determining the quality of education and eventually the quality of work a young person receives?
The state reports roughly 11,800 schools, 1.2 million learners and 93,100 teachers, alongside 86 flagship schools, digital platforms, smart classrooms and teacher development programmes. These are substantial interventions and they deserve recognition. But they also create a higher burden of proof, because a school is not educated by a budget. A child is. And the real test is not how impressive the system looks from the ministry’s office. It is what one child experiences from the first day of primary school to the last day of university, and what happens to that child afterward.
Before WAEC, before JAMB, before anyone begins talking about employability, there is primary school, where literacy, numeracy, confidence and basic learning habits are formed. A weak foundation does not disappear when a child enters secondary school. It follows the child.
This is where the private–public difference can quietly become consequential. Some well-resourced private primary schools offer smaller classes, more instructional materials, stronger ICT exposure, structured extracurricular programmes and closer parental reporting. Public primary schools vary enormously some strong, others under pressure from inadequate facilities, staffing constraints or large classes. The point is not that every private school is excellent or every public school deficient. It is that the probability of purchasing additional support when a child struggles rises with household income. If a child struggles to read, one family pays for intervention immediately. Another family may know exactly what the child needs and still be unable to afford it. That is how a learning gap begins not with stupidity, not with laziness, but with unequal capacity to respond. And because both children still receive the same national curriculum on paper, the gap that opens here is easy for a system to overlook.
By secondary school, laboratories, teachers, class size, libraries, ICT facilities, career guidance and examination preparation collide with socioeconomic status. Institutions such as Taidob College, Day Waterman College, Mercy land, Deeper Life High School, and Al-Ameen, among others, operate with resources and managerial flexibility many public schools cannot easily replicate. That does not make every student in those schools brilliant. It gives many of them a stronger environment in which brilliance can be developed, including, where boarding is well managed, a structured routine of supervised study that some public alternatives cannot yet match.
The laboratory problem is not imaginary. Research on the availability and use of Chemistry laboratory resources in Ogun secondary schools has consistently found the same pattern: where laboratories are absent, under-equipped or simply unused, Chemistry achievement suffers. A study in Ijebu-Ode Local Government Area found a significant relationship between laboratory utilization and student performance, while most schools surveyed lacked adequate resources for Chemistry instruction in the first place. A laboratory is not a decorative room. Where the equipment is missing or unused, the results follow.
Ogun’s 2026 budget commits to continuing the rehabilitation of science laboratories and technical colleges alongside STEM teacher training a positive intervention, though the exact number of laboratories being built or rehabilitated this year should be confirmed against the Ministry of Education’s own figures rather than estimated. Construction is only the beginning. A laboratory needs equipment, maintenance, student access and teachers with the competence and time to use it, and government should eventually publish evidence of practical learning outcomes, not just a count of buildings.
You cannot expect a student to develop practical scientific competence in a laboratory that exists mainly on paper.
But the evidence refuses to hand us an easy villain. Comparative research on Chemistry interest among selected public and private schools has found no significant difference between the two groups, meaning we should resist a lazy story in which private-school students are naturally more interested or more capable. The more defensible argument is that students of similar potential are simply given different environments in which to develop it. That is the inequality worth discussing.
Buildings do not teach. Teachers do, and this may be the most important comparison between the two systems. The question is not simply whether a teacher is qualified, but whether they are available, supported, supervised and continuously developed. Ogun’s Economic Transformation Project reports STEM capacity building reaching a large number of secondary schools, alongside rehabilitated flagship school laboratories. Its own assessment, however, identified a real contradiction: rising enrolment in flagship schools created teacher shortages, with existing staff reported as overworked, while rural secondary schools received proportionally less of the intervention.
That contradiction is instructive. Government can improve infrastructure and training and still leave a distribution problem behind, because quality is not created by one intervention. It is created by an ecosystem, and remuneration is part of that ecosystem. Neither private nor public employment automatically produces better teaching. The real issue is whether the system can attract, develop, retain and hold teachers accountable, since teacher quality is the exact point where public spending finally reaches the learner.
A national curriculum does not guarantee identical learning. One school can add robotics, coding, research projects, debate and intensive practical work; another can struggle simply to complete the prescribed scheme of work because of staffing or time. The difference is not what the curriculum says. It is what a school has the capacity to do with it. Ogun’s medium-term expenditure framework already proposes curriculum reform strengthening technical, ICT, science and entrepreneurship education alongside teacher retraining. That is the right direction. Policy must now become classroom practice.
WAEC, NECO and JAMB are standardised. The preparation behind them is not. Some students arrive with years of practical work, private tutoring, mock examinations and intervention when they fall behind. Others depend almost entirely on what their school could provide. This does not make results meaningless. It means results should not be read without understanding the conditions under which the learning happened. Merit matters. So does opportunity. A fair system protects both.
There is a harder question hiding underneath this one: when did an ordinary public-school student in Ogun last dominate the headlines as the state’s outstanding WAEC or JAMB candidate? The absence of a recent headline proves nothing on its own, but it is worth asking why exceptional public-school performance so rarely becomes the story that defines our conversation about excellence, and why some families quietly move children out of public schools mid-way, not because every public school fails, but because they have lost confidence that theirs will adequately prepare their child for the examination that decides the next stage of life.
That loss of confidence has a darker edge. Where a certificate begins to matter more than the learning behind it, examination malpractice finds an opening. Ogun does not need to pretend this is only a private-school or only a public-school problem. Nigerian research on “miracle” examination centres has documented malpractice tied to private institutions, while WAEC’s own sanction records have listed both public and private schools among offenders. Studies of student attitudes toward malpractice in Ogun secondary schools have pointed to fear of failure, compromised invigilation, inadequate teaching and overcrowded exam conditions as recurring causes. Private school is not a synonym for integrity, and public school is not a synonym for failure. But a weak pipeline creates the pressure that makes malpractice tempting, so the answer is not only to police the examination hall. It is to give students competent teachers before the exam year, functioning laboratories before the practical paper, and intervention before failure becomes permanent then demand integrity once the exam begins.
This is where Ogun deserves credit and criticism together. Flagship schools, STEM laboratories, digital platforms such as DiPER and OgunLEARN, and teacher capacity interventions are not imaginary. They are real investments. The problem is that success concentrated in a selected group of schools is not the same as system-wide equality. If a flagship school becomes excellent while the ordinary school beside it remains ordinary, has Ogun equalised education, or simply built islands of excellence inside a wider sea of uneven provision? Where flagship practices succeed, they should be documented and transferred outward. Bridges, not islands.
The race does not end at WAEC. It follows both students into university and into the job hunt, and by 2025 the state itself was treating that as urgent enough to intervene. Ogun launched a Job Centre and Work Hub in Idi-Aba, Abeokuta, in partnership with Germany’s GIZ, offering career counselling, job matching and entrepreneurship training, with the 2026 budget committing to expand it. In July 2026, the state’s Commissioner for Budget and Planning told a World Population Day audience to stop training young people for certificates and start training them for productivity. Both moments are government, in its own words, admitting that a diploma is no longer where the Nepo–Lapo gap closes. It is where a new one opens.
Research on youth unemployment in Ogun points to familiar predictors: a high rate of graduate turnout relative to available jobs, weak employability and entrepreneurial skills, the decline of manufacturing the state once relied on, unstable electricity, and a curriculum still lopsided against what employers need. None of that is evenly distributed. The Nepo graduate typically leaves university carrying the digital literacy, communication polish and network that close that gap without effort. The Lapo graduate often does not, which is exactly the deficit a 2025 intervention study in Ijebu-Ode targeted directly, training unemployed graduates in Google Workspace, LinkedIn, Canva and CV writing because those specific, teachable gaps stood between them and a first job. If a short training course can measurably move a graduate closer to employment, then what was holding them back was never ambition. It was exposure, the resource a Nepo household buys without thinking about it.
National figures on youth unemployment vary so widely across sources that no single number should be quoted as settled fact. What is not in dispute is the direction of concern shared by government commissioners, GIZ and Ogun’s own researchers: a widening mismatch between what young people are taught and what the job market will pay them for. The laptop, the internet access, the internship, the professional network and a family’s ability to absorb an unexpected expense all become part of the same Nepo advantage that started in primary school. It has simply changed shape.
Private schools should not be demonized for providing what parents are willing to pay for. They contribute innovation, competition and choice. The real problem begins when private education becomes the escape route from public inadequacy rather than simply another option within a healthy system. Not every public school needs to resemble the most expensive private school in Ogun. But every public-school child should be able to expect a functional classroom, competent teachers, working laboratories where required, basic digital access and a curriculum that is actually delivered, and every graduate should be able to expect that a state announcing a jobs strategy will measure whether it works. That is not luxury. It is the minimum standard.
Measure the gap instead of only describing it. A transparent, annual Public School Quality Index, covering teacher availability, class size, laboratory functionality, ICT access, attendance and learning outcomes, disaggregated by school and local government, would stop rural disadvantage from hiding inside statewide averages. Every rehabilitated or newly built laboratory should come with a maintenance plan, an equipment inventory and a utilization record, not just a photograph at commissioning.
Match teacher recruitment with rational deployment, so hard-to-reach schools receive retention incentives rather than the leftover staff of better-resourced ones, and make professional development continuous rather than ceremonial. Protect foundational learning in primary schools before chasing globally competitive graduates. Early intervention is cheaper and more humane than a secondary-school learning crisis. Extend enrichment such as coding, debate, entrepreneurship and practical science into public schools rather than leaving it as something only private tuition buys. Let flagship-school practices travel outward instead of staying concentrated. And follow students beyond enrolment: track whether Job Centre graduates are actually employed twelve months later, and publish it, the same way the state publishes budget lines.
The joke is useful because it gives us language. But children should not become the punchline of an inequality they did not create. The Nepo student is not the enemy. The Lapo student is not a victim by birth. And public school is not a synonym for failure. The real problem is a system in which the quality of a child’s opportunity, in school and afterward in the job market, is too closely tied to the purchasing power of that child’s parents.
Ogun has the budget, the schools, the teachers, the flagship programmes, the digital platforms and, increasingly, the evidence showing where the gaps are. What it still needs is the harder thing: system-wide equality of opportunity, measured and published, from primary school through the first year after graduation.
The child who attends an expensive private school should be allowed to enjoy an excellent education. But the child whose parents cannot afford that school should not have to apologise for receiving less. If Ogun can make that principle real, Nepo and Lapo can remain what they should have been all along a joke on the street, not a description of two different futures.
That is the right race. The public remains the final examiner.
