HELP! Nigerians no longer READ

•Declining reading culture threatens Nigeria’s future

•Experts seek restoration of reading culture, value re-orientation

In this report, IFEDAYO OGUNYEMI delves into the deeper crisis threatening Nigeria’s future and how a nation once proud of its literary icons now battles dwindling literacy, distracted youth, institutional rot, and an economy poised to suffer the consequences.

AT just 16 years old, Temitope Adegbami is an exception in a nation at war with its educational future. A student of Orogun Grammar School in Ibadan North Local Government, Adegbami scored a remarkable 341 in the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), an examination conducted by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), defying a troubling national trend of mass failure.

“I have been reading for about six hours daily, even before any of the exams came to the fore, and I evaluate whatever I read by solving past questions every time,” she explained. “I enjoy reading even beyond what we are expected to read. I read textbooks, notebooks, and use past questions a lot. Beyond that, I read novels and literary texts.”

Adegbami’s result is part of the over 12,000 results from the nearly two million candidates that were celebrated recently when JAMB released the results of the 2025 examination. In 2025, over 1.9 million candidates sat for the UTME. Of these, only 12,414 scored above 300. More than 1.5 million students scored below 200, a statistic that has reignited fierce debate about the state of education in Nigeria.

This decline in examination performance is not isolated to JAMB exams. The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) reported in 2024 that only 72.12% of candidates obtained at least five credits, including English and Mathematics. The result represents a 7.69% drop from the 2023 exam. The National Examinations Council (NECO) has reported similar trends.

While JAMB attributed some poor performances to technical glitches, which forced it to organise a resit for 380,000 candidates, mass failure has now become a nationwide spectacle and a troubling trend. Experts say the numbers also reflect a deeper, systemic issue: a deteriorating reading culture among Nigerian students.

Beyond her success story in 2025 JAMB, 16-year-old Adegbami is currently sitting for the ongoing WAEC exams. Speaking to the Sunday Tribune shortly after writing her Biology examination on Friday, Adegbami said she aspires to be more than just a student who aces exams.

“I aspire to become a writer and to be relevant in the technological space. I plan to do something related to Artificial Intelligence, engineering and robotics,” she said. “Once I’m done with exams, I’ll commit to it fully.”

Many decades ago, aspirations like this were a regular feature among children and teenagers who took to reading on their journey to becoming great men and women of substance in different fields of endeavours. But stories like Adegbami’s are becoming so rare as they are now becoming a bright flicker in an environment growing increasingly hostile to learning and critical inquiry, following the perennial mass failure and recurrent dismal performance of many young students in national and regional examinations.

Education stakeholders are sounding the alarm, not just about grades, but about what these grades and the systems that produce them say about Nigeria’s human capital development and its future workforce.

A Culture in Crisis

Beyond individual habits, systemic issues exacerbate the problem. Many schools lack functional libraries, and where libraries exist, they are often under-resourced. The high cost of books and limited access to reading materials further hinder students’ ability to cultivate reading habits. Moreover, the emphasis on rote learning over critical engagement in the curriculum discourages exploratory reading.

Once a country that prided itself on literary giants like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, Buchi Emecheta, Ola Rotimi, Biyi Bandele Thomas and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigeria now contends with a culture where reading is becoming a relic of the past. A leading literacy advocate and founder of the Bookworms Empowerment Foundation, Professor Oshiotse Andrew Okwilagwe, frames the decline in reading culture as a national emergency.

“Nigeria… faces an unsettling paradox,” he noted in a recent study. “While the country has produced globally acclaimed authors, the reading culture among the general populace remains alarmingly poor.”

According to him, the causes are multifaceted: poverty, illiteracy, limited access to books, poorly funded libraries, and a school system that prioritises cramming over comprehension.

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A 2021 study by Adeyemi, Alabi, and Olatunji, which was cited by Okwilagwe, found that fewer than 30 per cent of students in three South-Western states read any non-prescribed book. The problem, as Professor Okwilagwe explains, begins at home and worsens through institutional neglect.

“For many Nigerian families, daily survival is a priority, and the purchase of books is seen as a luxury rather than a necessity,” he stated. “Without the ability to read, individuals are excluded from the world of books, and the absence of a reading tradition within families further entrenches this problem across generations.”

He further said: “The decline in reading culture is not only a result of socio-economic factors but also of institutional failings. Nigeria’s educational system has long been criticised for prioritising rote memorisation over critical thinking and creative engagement with texts. From primary to tertiary levels, students are frequently encouraged to memorise facts to pass examinations, rather than to read widely for understanding or personal development.

“Moreover, libraries — the traditional custodians of reading culture — are in a deplorable state. A survey of public libraries in Nigeria conducted in 2020 by the Nigerian Library Association revealed that over 60 per cent of libraries lacked current reading materials, while staffing and facilities were grossly inadequate. School libraries, where available, often house outdated books that do little to inspire a love for reading among pupils and students.

“Government policies on literacy and reading promotion have also been inconsistent and insufficiently funded. National reading campaigns, when launched, are often short-lived and fail to reach those in rural and marginalised communities. Furthermore, there is a dearth of support for local authors and publishers, making indigenous literature scarce and limiting the availability of culturally relevant reading materials for Nigerian readers.”

Social Media, Shortcuts, and Shift in Values

Aside from that, Nigeria’s young population is deeply immersed in digital life. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube dominate students’ attention. While digital tools can enhance learning, they have largely become distractions in a country where digital literacy does not equate to deep learning.

Founder of Reliable Link Tutors, Timilehin Olonisaye, sees firsthand the shift in student priorities. “Many years ago… the streets and football fields were usually empty” during WAEC exams, he recalled. “Many of them are now on TikTok, even though the exam is on, possibly because they know they will engage in malpractice to pass such an exam.”

In Olonisaye’s view, social media and the glamorisation of content creation have reshaped what young Nigerians aspire to. “Almost every young person wants to be a content creator… It is not a productive economy. How many people will content creation employ?” he asked.

“Our societal values have eroded, and the teacher can only do a little because they spend roughly six hours with the students daily. What do they do with the rest of their hours? Who are their role models and accountability partners, particularly when many parents are out of the house, struggling to make ends meet because of the harsh economy? Some parents don’t even know the class that their children/wards are in,” Olonisaye explained.

Despite this cultural shift in reading among students, his tutorial centre managed a 75% pass rate in this year’s JAMB — the best in its history. “We took them through rigorous classwork, assignments and mock exams,” he said. “Between September and April, we had 242 students who enrolled in our tutorial classes, but we rounded off the classes with around 200 students. When the result came out, our pass rate was higher than 75%, and it is our best year yet in terms of preparing people for JAMB in spite of the mass failure recorded.”

Still, he recognises that tutoring alone cannot fix a deeply fractured system. “There is a need for reorientation at every level,” he said, warning that no amount of government spending will matter if core societal values remain eroded.

“Many years ago, tutorial centres were always filled to the brim, but social media and other distractions have bastardised that attention span and the system today,” he added.

Conspiracies in the Exam Hall

Also, for many students in rural and low-income areas, the reading crisis is exacerbated by poverty and language barriers. English, the language of instruction and examination, is not the first language for many Nigerian students. Limited access to books in indigenous languages further alienates students from reading.

The consequences of poor reading habits are far-reaching. Employers increasingly report that graduates lack basic communication and analytical skills. At the national level, poor literacy rates undermine civic engagement and hinder efforts to drive innovation, governance, and development.

Checks among secondary schools also indicate that belief in malpractice has become a safe haven for many as they disregard moral uprightness but embrace sharp practices to beat the system, they feel demands so much from them.

One teacher in the Osun State Civil Service, who asked to remain anonymous, painted a grim picture of the entrenched examination malpractice that is dismantling the educational foundation. “Malpractice doesn’t help the system or the students,” she said. “In the twinkle of an eye, you can forward exam questions and answers to anyone, anywhere.”

She explained how schools, especially private ones, collude with tutorial centres to facilitate cheating. “WAEC does not accredit tutorial centres to partake in its exams, [so] the centres partner with private schools, and many of the schools are complicit.”

Her examples were chilling. From students with A1s and B2s in WAEC who cannot define “matter” or solve basic arithmetic problems to medical school aspirants with JAMB scores as low as 160 and education school applicants with a combined admission score of just 30/100.

“These students… will possibly become teachers and professionals in that same system and produce another set of them,” she warned. “That is nothing other than a keg of gunpowder.”

She described the widespread nature of the malpractice ecosystem, which she believes was threatened by the government’s proposed switch to computer-based testing (CBT) for WAEC and NECO, as the reason behind the technical glitches that marred the conduct of 2025 UTME.

“What happened is a sabotage of the great works and achievements [JAMB registrar] Oloyede has been able to record,” she alleged. “Everyone at every level of the malpractice ladder gets paid well.”

Speaking further, she said: “The system is to be blamed for all of this rampant malpractice and poor performance because you find out that officials and supervisors provide answers even to school leavers preparing for the common entrance examination.

“At the o’level, after struggling to pass JAMB, these sets of students who depended on malpractice to get good grades in WAEC will now seek admission in schools that don’t depend on post-UTME or private schools. It is the bad products that we produce in secondary schools that are churning out to many tertiary institutions.”

Reclaiming the Future

The implications of this systemic failure go beyond academics. If Nigeria continues to churn out graduates who lack critical thinking skills and foundational knowledge, its economic development, healthcare, technological advancement, and governance will suffer.

“Imagine some people gaining admission to study medicine, having got 160 in JAMB,” the Osun teacher lamented. “I pray they don’t end our lives in the next 10 to 20 years with quackery.”

The same concern applies across other professions, including engineering, law, education, and public service, which are all at risk of being populated by individuals whose credentials are earned, not through merit, but through manipulation.

If Nigeria is to reclaim its future, experts agree that reforms must go beyond policy papers and lip service. Such reforms, they said, must include a complete overhaul of the exam system to eliminate opportunities for malpractice; a cultural shift that revalues education and rewards learning over shortcuts; investment in libraries and reading infrastructure, especially in rural areas; parent-teacher partnerships, with parents more involved in their children’s academic journey and support for local publishing and the availability of culturally relevant materials, among others.

It is one of the reasons non-governmental organisations have also devised efforts and strategies towards rescuing the nation from the impending doom. For instance, the Bookworms Empowerment Foundation created mobile libraries known as “Book Buses,” reading clubs in underserved communities as part of efforts to reverse the damage created by the poor reading culture. But these efforts, while laudable, remain isolated acts of resistance against a tide of systemic failure.

Professor Okwilagwe also told Sunday Tribune that reading to foetus while it is still in the womb and after the baby is born will help inculcate the culture of reading for many of them as they grow up, saying “Children who engage with books from an early age perform better academically, develop better problem-solving skills, and are more likely to become lifelong learners.”

“As you are here with me, what you are today is based on some of the values you got from your parents and immediate environment. The seed was planted, nurtured it grew well. That’s exactly that’s what the prenatal and post-natal reading is all about,” he told Sunday Tribune in an interview.