Education Minister Tunji Alausa has announced the abolition of Nigeria’s disarticulation policy separating junior and senior secondary schools, declaring it an outright failure that has contributed to a staggering 20 million student dropout crisis and a crippling imbalance between school levels nationwide.
It took 20 million missing children to finally kill a policy that should never have survived this long.
Education Minister Tunji Alausa stood before the inauguration of the Universal Basic Education Commission ministerial implementation and monitoring committee in Abuja on Tuesday and delivered a blunt, overdue verdict on Nigeria’s disarticulation policy — the framework requiring Junior Secondary Schools and Senior Secondary Schools to operate as entirely separate administrative entities.
“I can objectively report today that this disarticulation policy has failed. We will phase it out,” Alausa declared, according to The Cable.
The numbers behind that declaration are staggering. Nigeria currently has 80,000 public primary schools feeding into just 15,000 junior secondary schools — a ratio of one to eight. And of the millions of children who begin primary education, over 20 million never make it to senior secondary school.
“We have 20 million dropouts from primary school to JSS. Where are those students?” Alausa asked pointedly.
The minister also highlighted a peculiar structural absurdity the policy created — overflowing junior secondary schools sitting alongside near-empty senior secondary schools, each saddled with separate principals and administrative structures that serve bureaucracy far better than they serve children.
“We have overflowing JSS and empty senior secondary schools. So we can’t be creating positions because we want to create a director level for people while we harm our education system. It’s not right. It’s about doing what is good for every Nigerian child,” he said.
Beyond scrapping the policy, Alausa tasked the newly inaugurated UBEC committee with a concrete mission — ensuring hundreds of smart schools, bilingual schools and alternative schools already funded by UBEC are completed, handed over to states and actually opened for learning.
He acknowledged a troubling pattern of funds released but projects unfinished, and completed schools sitting idle rather than welcoming students.
Nigeria has 20 million reasons to get this right.
The minister says this government won’t repeat its predecessors’ failures. Twenty million children are watching to see if he means it.
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