The Audacity of Enugu’s Education Transformation

Guest Columnist By Peter Mbah

I am fascinated by the word – “Audacity”. It suggests courage and a willingness to attempt something that seems unreasonable. So, I want to begin with the circumstances that made our choices in Enugu necessary.

Nigeria is one of the youngest countries in the world. Almost two-thirds of our population is under 30. In that fact lies an extraordinary possibility. This generation could become the greatest engine of growth, creativity and productivity Nigeria has ever known. But there is another possibility. That youth bulge, as I have said before, can become a demographic dividend. Or it can become a demographic catastrophe. And we should be clear about what will determine the difference.

Today, the Nigerian statistics in relation to the world’s out-of-school children is unflattering. Equally worrying is a recent UNICEF report arising from proficiency tests in basic subjects for children at Junior Secondary 2. The report shows that pupils are, more or less, merely going through the motions of learning – without actually imbibing any knowledge.

Think about that. We are not simply dealing with an access crisis. We are dealing with a learning crisis. And it is playing out against a world in which knowledge is becoming more valuable by the day; in which technology is transforming work before our eyes; in which the countries that prosper will increasingly be those capable of creating, applying and adapting knowledge. That is the world into which this enormous generation of young Nigerians is coming.

So, when we talk about transforming education, we are not having an abstract conversation about schools. We are talking about the future productive capacity of this country.

When we came into government in Enugu, we had to look at that reality very closely. We could have repaired the existing system. We could have renovated some classrooms, supplied some desks, put computers into a few schools and called it reform. But we had to ask ourselves a more difficult question: would it be enough? Would an education system essentially designed for the world of 40 years ago prepare an Enugu child for the world of 20 years from now? Our answer was “no.” And once we accepted that, the scale of our response had to change. This is where the idea of audacity begins to acquire some meaning. We did not decide simply to improve the old classroom.

We decided to rethink the nature of education in Enugu entirely. We committed ourselves to building 260 Smart Green Schools, one in every ward of Enugu State. So far, that’s more than 7,000 classrooms built.

And we deliberately took them beyond the urban centres, into communities where children had too often inherited the quality of education that geography and circumstance happened to give them.

We moved from rote learning towards experiential learning; from memorising the answer towards understanding the problem; towards collaboration, critical thinking, digital capability and the practical application of knowledge.

We put our money behind that conviction. For three successive budget cycles, approximately one-third of our state budget has gone to education. This is an extraordinary commitment of public resources.

But it came from an equally strong conviction: if we are serious about ending poverty, we have to get to its roots. For us, one of those roots is lack of knowledge; lack of know-how; lack of the capabilities through which people create wealth, find employment, build enterprises, participate intelligently in society and determine the direction of their own lives. And the brutal calculation we made was that whatever education costs us today, ignorance will cost us far more tomorrow.

Of course, none of this exists in isolation. A child cannot flourish in a school surrounded by a failing society. So, while we were transforming education, we were also confronting insecurity, rebuilding roads, expanding healthcare, restoring water, modernising transport and creating the conditions in which investment could return.

Over 1,500 kilometres of roads have now been constructed or reconstructed. Across the same 260 wards in which we have placed our Smart Green Schools, we have been building 260 Type-2 Primary Healthcare Centres.

And critically, we have had to find the resources to sustain that scale of ambition. In 2022, before our administration came into office, Enugu State generated approximately N27 billion internally. In 2025, our internally-generated revenue exceeded N400 billion. While tax revenue accounted for N51.5bn or 12.6 per cent, N355.2bn or 87.4 per cent of the total sum came from non-tax revenue, mainly from our investments and the revival, optimisation, and monetisation of our hitherto moribund assets.

Again, this remarkable income growth has not occurred in isolation. We must recognize and compliment the Federal Government’s macroeconomic adjustments and reforms that have created fiscal strength, improved public financing and external buffers. The result is adequate fiscal capacity at the sub-national level.

The point here is straightforward: Transformation cannot survive on aspiration alone. Eventually somebody has to pay for it. What we have attempted in Enugu is therefore not a collection of education projects. It is a change in the entire development model – a quantum leap.

There are moments when incremental improvement is responsible. There are other moments when incremental improvement simply preserves the distance between where you are and where the world is going. We concluded that education in Enugu had reached such a moment.

But let me also say this: building schools is the visible part. Changing an education system is much harder. That’s because, ultimately, a school is only as transformative as what happens between a teacher and a child. And no education system can rise above the quality of its teachers. That may be the single greatest challenge in everything we are attempting.

We are asking teachers who themselves grew up within a particular educational tradition to help us create a different one. For decades, the dominant method was familiar: the teacher stood at the front; knowledge travelled in one direction; children copied, repeated, memorized and reproduced.

Now we are asking something very different of both teacher and learner.

 This is a profound cultural change that requires us to build the human capacity to sustain it.

That is why teacher development, continuous professional learning and the work of the Centre for Experiential Learning and Innovation are so important to us. The buildings may be new. But unless the culture of learning changes with them, we will simply have recreated the old system inside more beautiful walls.

Occasionally, however, something happens that allows you to glimpse what all this might become. I had one of those moments recently. Let me share a riveting story:

There is a young boy at our Smart Green School in Owo. He has been there for about two years. Owo is not in metropolitan Enugu. It is the sort of community where, until very recently, a child could have gone through most of his basic education without meaningful contact with a computer.

 This boy was recently invited to help train students from other schools. I watched the video. He was standing in front of boys from schools in the city, encouraging them as much as teaching them.

In barely two years, he had learned to use technology confidently, build websites, work with digital platforms and understand how Artificial Intelligence could make him more productive. Now he was passing that confidence on, sort of prodding his audience: “you can do this too. Believe in what you are capable of.”

I had goosebumps watching him. Here was a young boy from Owo, from a community where this kind of access would once have been unimaginable, now showing students from the city what was possible.

Education had not simply given him digital skills. It had changed his sense of his own possibility – and already he was enlarging the possibilities for others. That, for me, is the transformation in action. We must judge the system by what our children know, what they can do, and who they become.

And perhaps it also answers something about what we mean by inclusion. The talent was always there; The intelligence was always there. What was missing was access.

Yet, Distinguished guests, evident transformations do not necessarily erase doubts. I understand such doubts.

If you live in a community where the road is poor, where you need running water, where your immediate concern is feeding your family, a Smart Green School can sound like an elitist luxury.

If you are a teacher who has worked in one way for twenty years, transformation can sound suspiciously like somebody telling you that everything you know is obsolete.

And if you are responsible for public finances, committing one-third of a state budget to education raises a perfectly reasonable question: can we afford this?

I would turn that question around: can we afford not to? If we fix the road today but fail to educate the child who will maintain it tomorrow, how sustainable was our investment in the road? If we build factories but lack the skilled people capable of running increasingly sophisticated production systems, where is our own Industrial Revolution going to come from?

If Nigeria is to become a creation economy rather than a consumption economy — a knowledge economy able to compete, collaborate and contribute to the world — then we must equip our young people not simply to use what the world creates, but to research, design, engineer and create what the world needs.

And if millions of young people reach adulthood without the knowledge and capabilities to participate meaningfully in the economy, what exactly do we imagine the social cost of that will be?

 I have never regarded our investment in education as discretionary spending. It is preventative investment in the future stability and prosperity of our society.

There is also something that’s unusual – politically – about education. Much of what governments build can be commissioned within a term of office. Education does not give you that satisfaction.

Some of the three-year-olds entering our schools today will not reach the height of their productive lives for another 20 years. I will not be Governor then. Most of us sitting in this hall will never know the full return on the investments we are making now.

I described this recently as a labour of love. We are investing enormous resources belonging to the people in outcomes that may fully reveal themselves only after you have left government.

But that is precisely what leadership sometimes requires. Our responsibility cannot end at the boundary of our tenure. A child’s education lasts far longer than the tenure of a governor or commissioner.

So, I return to the title of this address: “The Audacity of Enugu’s Education Transformation.” Yes. The turn should be that audacity and necessity are not opposites. The deeper you understand the necessity, the more audacious the response has to become.

I’d reshape it like this: yes, perhaps it took some audacity to commit a third of our budget to education. Perhaps it took audacity to attempt 260 Smart Green Schools simultaneously across every ward.

Perhaps it takes audacity to ask an entire education system—government, teachers, parents and children—to step beyond familiar methods and embrace something fundamentally different.

But audacity does not mean acting recklessly. Sometimes it means having the courage to recognise what is necessary — and then acting at the scale that necessity demands.

Because what was the alternative? Nigeria has one of the largest populations of young people on earth. We have enormous ambitions to become a creation economy rather than a consumption economy; a knowledge economy able to compete, collaborate and contribute to the world.

We want to eradicate poverty, create wealth, and enable our young people to build meaningful futures here. How do we achieve any of those things without the knowledge base to research, design, produce and create? That is the connection we must make. And once we make it, audacity becomes necessity.

I believe Nigeria has reached the point where we must treat education as a national emergency. Not rhetorically, but in our budgets, our teacher development, our infrastructure, the standards we demand, and the partnerships we build between the Federal Government, states, development agencies, communities and the private sector.

Our future prosperity depends upon the knowledge and capabilities of our people, after all. And that means every Nigerian child, wherever they are born, must have access to an education capable of preparing them for the world they are entering.

Once we understand that, the question changes. It is no longer: can we afford to make this quantum leap? It becomes: What will happen to us if we do not?

Our demographic dividend could be extraordinary. But that future will not simply arrive. We have to build it. And if Enugu’s experience offers one lesson, I hope it is this: when the scale of the challenge demands a quantum leap, audacity is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

Thank you.

•Mbah, Governor of Enugu State, delivered the keynote address at the 2026 Enugu State Education Summit themed “Transforming Education for the Future: Leadership, Innovation, Partnership, Financing and Sustainable Reform”