The Federal Ministry of Education supervises more agencies than most Nigerians can name. TheDiggerNews.com review finds dangerous duplication at the top — and a catastrophic funding crisis at the bottom. KEHINDE ADEGOKE reports.
Walk into any public secondary school in Nigeria today — a Federal Government College, a Unity School, a state-run classroom. The roof may be leaking. The desks may be broken. The teacher may not have been paid.
Now consider this: the same federal government that cannot adequately fund those classrooms is simultaneously running 27 agencies under the Federal Ministry of Education — with a combined education-sector agency network of 267 entities absorbing ₦3.59 trillion in the 2026 proposed budget, while Nigeria’s share of education spending as a percentage of GDP sits at a figure so low it barely registers between 0.53% and 1.7%.
The gap between the institutional architecture at the top and the learning reality at the bottom is the central scandal of Nigerian education — and it is hiding in plain sight on the ministry’s own website.
27 Agencies. Four Clusters. One Question.
TheDiggerNews.com review of the Federal Ministry of Education’s publicly listed agencies — hosted on the ministry’s official website at education.gov.ng — identifies 27 agencies under its direct supervision. They range from the well-known (NUC, JAMB, WAEC, NECO, TETFund) to the obscure (National Mathematical Centre, Librarians’ Registration Council of Nigeria, Nigerian Arabic Language Village).
A closer examination reveals at least four clusters of agencies with overlapping or near-identical mandates — separate institutions with separate Directors-General, separate headquarters, separate boards, separate staff structures, and separate budget lines, doing work that could, in principle, be done by one.
Cluster One: Three Agencies for Language Education
Nigerian French Language Village (NFLV) — Badagry, Lagos State
Nigerian Arabic Language Village (NALV) — Nguru, Yobe State
National Institute for Nigerian Languages (NINLAN) — Aba, Abia State
All three exist to promote language learning and preservation. All three have independent bureaucratic structures. All three draw from the same education budget. The rationale for maintaining three separate agencies — rather than a single national languages and linguistics institute with divisions — has never been publicly explained or subjected to value-for-money scrutiny.
Cluster Two: Three Agencies for Out-of-School and Non-Formal Education
National Commission for Nomadic Education
National Commission for Almajiri and Out of School Children Education (NCAOOSCE)
National Commission for Mass Literacy, Adult and Non-Formal Education
All three target Nigerians outside the formal school system — nomadic communities, Almajiri children, adult learners, and the functionally illiterate. Their target populations overlap significantly. Their mandates are distinguished more by political history than by operational logic: each was created at a different political moment to satisfy a different constituency, and none has since been rationalised into a unified non-formal education authority. Nigeria has an estimated 10.2 million out-of-school children — the largest such population in the world. Three separate agencies with three separate administrative overheads have not solved that problem.
Cluster Three: Two Agencies for Arabic and Islamic Education
National Board for Arabic and Islamic Studies (NBAIS)
Nigerian Arabic Language Village (NALV)
Both specifically cover Arabic language and Islamic education content. NALV appears in Cluster One above as a language agency — and again here as an Islamic education agency. The dual classification is itself evidence of mandate confusion. Two agencies, both drawing on federal education funds, both focused on Arabic and Islamic learning, with no clear operational distinction publicly documented.
Cluster Four: Regulatory Overlap in Technical Education
National Board for Technical Education (NBTE)
Computer Professionals Registration Council of Nigeria (CPN)
Both regulate technical and professional education pathways. More strikingly, the Computer Professionals Registration Council sits under the Federal Ministry of Education, not the Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, where its mandate most logically belongs. This is not a duplication of function so much as a misallocation of institutional home — one that has persisted through successive administrations without correction.
The Numbers That Make the Duplication Unforgivable
If agency duplication were costless, it might be tolerated as a bureaucratic tradition. It is not costless. And the BudgIT data attached to this investigation makes the cost visible with devastating clarity.
In 2025, the Federal Ministry of Education and its 249 departments, agencies and parastatals received a combined allocation of ₦2.59 trillion. Of that, recurrent obligations — personnel costs and overhead — consumed ₦1.66 trillion, or 63.82% of the total. Capital expenditure, the money that actually builds schools and buys textbooks, received just ₦938.57 billion, or 36.17%.
In 2026, the proposed education allocation has risen to ₦3.59 trillion across 267 agencies. But the percentage of the total federal budget going to education has not risen proportionately. It stands at just 6.15% — down from 7.82% in 2025 and far below the UNESCO-recommended minimum of 15%.
The UNESCO benchmark funding gap — the difference between what Nigeria spends and what the minimum target requires — has widened from ₦1.89 trillion in 2023 to a projected ₦5.18 trillion in 2026. In three years, Nigeria’s education funding deficit has nearly tripled. In the same period, the number of agencies under the ministry has grown from 249 to 267.
More agencies. Less proportionate funding. Wider gap. That is Nigeria’s education trajectory in three numbers.
How Nigeria Compares — and Where It Ranks
Nigeria does not rank poorly against UNESCO benchmarks by a narrow margin. It ranks catastrophically.
A long-term assessment of African nations’ adherence to UNESCO’s education funding recommendations — covering the period 1999 to 2021 — ranked Nigeria sixth among six selected African countries:
Ghana — ranked first, with average allocations significantly exceeding both the 15% and 20% benchmarks
Kenya — ranked second, consistently above the 15% and 20% benchmarks
Senegal — ranked third, significantly above the 15% mark
South Africa — ranked fourth, comparable to the 20% benchmark
Morocco — ranked fifth, exceeding 15% but below 20%
Nigeria — ranked last
Nigeria’s education expenditure as a percentage of GDP sits between 0.53% and 1.7% — against the Education 2030 Agenda benchmark of 4% to 6% and a Sub-Saharan African average of 4.6%. By either measure, Nigeria is not merely underperforming. It is in a different category from its peers.
The contrast with subnational performance is striking. Oyo State’s 2026 budget allocated 17.40% of total spending to education — explicitly benchmarked against the UNESCO 15-20% target. A state government in Ibadan is meeting a standard that the federal government in Abuja has not met in any year for which data is available.
What 267 Agencies and 6.15% of the Budget Actually Mean
The architecture of Nigeria’s federal education system is, on paper, impressively large. Twenty-seven agencies listed on the ministry website. Two hundred and sixty-seven entities in the budget. A ₦3.59 trillion allocation.
But 63 kobo of every naira in the 2025 education budget went to paying the staff and running the offices of those agencies — not to building schools, not to buying textbooks, not to training teachers, not to reducing the 10.2 million out-of-school children figure that makes Nigeria the worst-performing large country on basic education access in the world.
The duplication identified in this report is not merely an organisational inefficiency. It is, in the context of Nigeria’s education funding crisis, a diversion of scarce resources from classrooms to bureaucracies — from children to institutions that exist, in some cases, to justify their own existence.
The Federal Government’s own figures show the funding gap widening every year. The number of agencies is growing every year. And Nigerian children — particularly the nomadic, the Almajiri, the rural, the poor — are being failed by both trends simultaneously.
What Needs to Happen
The case for a comprehensive agency rationalisation exercise under the Federal Ministry of Education is not new — it has been made by the World Bank, by BudgIT, and by education reform advocates for over a decade. What is new is the scale of the documented gap between the bureaucratic apparatus and the funding reality.
Specifically, a credible reform would need to:
Merge the three non-formal education commissions into a single National Commission for Non-Formal and Inclusive Education, with dedicated desks for nomadic, Almajiri and adult literacy programmes.
Consolidate the language agencies into a National Languages and Linguistics Institute under a single DG with divisional structures.
Merge the two Arabic/Islamic education bodies into one, eliminating the overlap between NALV and NBAIS.
Relocate the Computer Professionals Registration Council to the Federal Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, where its mandate logically belongs.
Ring-fence the savings from rationalisation directly into capital expenditure for basic education — specifically targeted at the 10.2 million out-of-school children.
None of this requires new legislation in its early stages. Some of it can be done by executive order. All of it would free up recurrent overhead that is currently subsidising duplication rather than educating children.
TheDiggerNews.com is seeking comment from the Federal Ministry of Education on the agency duplication identified in this report and on the widening UNESCO funding gap.
This analysis draws on publicly available data from BudgIT’s 2025 and 2026 education sector analyses, UNESCO education benchmarking data, the Federal Ministry of Education’s official website, and TheDiggerNews.com’s own review.
Kehinde Adegoke is an award-winning investigative journalist with more than 15 years of distinguished experience exposing stories that mould public discourse. With three industry nominations across diverse beats, he has earned recognition for fearless reporting, incisive analysis, and a commitment to accountability. As Managing Editor and CEO of TheDiggerNews.com, Adegoke leads a pioneering newsroom dedicated to exposing unseen truths, amplifying marginalised voices, and establishing new standards in investigative journalism.
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