PUBLIC primary and secondary schools across the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) are expected to shut down immediately following a directive by the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) ordering its members to join the ongoing strike by the FCTA workers.

The Joint Union Action Congress (JUAC) gave the directive as contained in a communiqué signed by the FCT NUT Chairman, Secretary, and Publicity Secretary, Abdullahi Shafas, Margaret Jethro, and Ibukun Adekeye, respectively.

The union said the decision followed a directive by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) instructing all its affiliates in the FCT to comply with the strike. “All teachers in FCT primary and secondary schools are to stay away from classrooms starting Monday,” part of the communiqué read.

The Bola Tinubu-led Federal Government of Nigeria has reaffirmed its commitment to repositioning teachers as the foundation of national development, rewarding outstanding educators with cash prizes totaling ₦350 million.

According to a release signed Tuesday by Folashade Boriowo, Director, Press and Public Relations, Federal Ministry of Education, Abuja, the Summit, themed Empowering Teachers, Strengthening the System: A National Agenda for Education Transformation and Sustainability, pulled educators, policymakers, state governments, unions, development partners, and the private sector to celebrate excellence in teaching and advance sustainable education reforms.

Delivering the keynote address, at the summit, the First Lady of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, described teachers as the quiet architects of great nations, noting that no nation can progress without adequately motivated, supported, and equipped educators.

If the university had a ‘Like’ button, it would be a small confession of defeat. A button is a decision protocol: click, register, rank. Platforms are built to harvest these clicks and, in return, arrange the world so that more or less of the same will come. Their basic code is attention/not-attention.

Universities are built to harvest something else: the slow conversion of confusion into capability. Their code is truth/not-truth in the domain of knowledge, and qualification/non-qualification in the domain of education. These codes can borrow from each other, occasionally flirt, sometimes quarrel but when attention becomes the chief arbiter of academic value, the court changes jurisdiction. You get verdicts efficiently, but on the wrong case.

We may as well be honest. The platform has already strolled into the campus wearing a lanyard: the learning management system with its heat maps of ‘engagement’, the dashboards that colour courses in green or red, the course evaluation stars that twinkle at budget meetings, the video player that counts watch-time as if comprehension were a cousin of endurance.

The university system is in crisis. Globally, the higher education sector is experiencing turbulent times. This has been evidenced by ongoing restructuring, significant job losses and employee overwork. Consequently, staff, both academic and professional, are left feeling stressed, undervalued and struggling with self-worth.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, staff were experiencing feelings of overwhelm. This experience has only become sharper amid the increase in generative AI, reduction in international students and subsequent redundancies.

Staff are suffering; they feel they must protect themselves from ‘the university’ and that they are not good enough. Preliminary findings from doctoral research which explores how coaching can support staff shows it cannot only help staff survive but also resist and push back against toxic environments and discover (or rediscover) their values, agency and well-being.

Universities have long treated teaching as an irreducibly human practice, grounded in the instructor’s epistemic authority to interpret knowledge, exercise judgement and mediate learning within shared social and moral worlds. Within this framing, learning unfolds as a guided encounter with expertise, shaped by explanation, dialogue and meaning-making.

Ontologically, teaching is assumed to reside in human presence and intentionality; epistemologically, understanding is thought to emerge through interpretation rather than computation. These assumptions have anchored academic identity and legitimised the centrality of human instructors for centuries. Yet they now operate less as settled foundations than as increasingly contested claims.

As artificial intelligence systems explain, adapt, diagnose and respond at scale, the once self-evident boundaries between human teaching and machine operation erode. The epistemological and ontological conditions of teaching are no longer merely evolving; they are being actively reconfigured or at least need to be.

Many of our students are struggling, not just academically, but existentially. They are living through the slow-motion collapse of systems and institutions that we and their parents once assured them were stable and secure. They’re anxious and exhausted from being asked to perform readiness for a world that many of them rightly sense does not exist anymore.

But they are also smart and resourceful, doing their best to adapt to increasingly fragmented societies that are largely indifferent to their well-being. So, when they turn to AI for support, whether with completing a course assignment or processing emotional overwhelm, it’s rarely out of laziness or naivetey; it’s a pragmatic response to the pressures they’re juggling.

Faculty, too, are navigating a changing world. Many of us carry grief and anxiety that something is ending, or already has, yet we’re still being asked to teach as if it hasn’t. In this context, it makes sense that many are responding to the arrival of AI in our classrooms from a desire to restore a sense of certainty and control.

School children don’t always seem too enthusiastic about their role in learning. An official education policy might encourage active learning and critical thinking, but all too often the reality in schools is “chalk and talk”, or rote learning, where only the teacher’s input counts.

Simply getting into school and staying there is a challenge for many children in Nigeria, where authorities have been shutting down private schools on safety and quality grounds. Thelma Obiakor studied the reasons that children are enrolled in these schools in the first place, and what the consequences of closing them could be.

It’s hard to imagine young people being able to co-create their education if they are exposed to violence at school. This is a problem in southern African countries like South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia, Eswatini, Zambia, Malawi and Angola, according to researchers.

In practice, government subventions, channelled mainly through the Ministry of Education, Ghana, are largely absorbed by employee compensation, leaving universities to fund most non-salary recurrent costs such as maintenance, teaching materials, ICT systems, and others through IGFs.

Infrastructure support from the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund) is important but episodic and insufficient for routine operations. Consequently, student fees have become a core financing pillar rather than a supplementary revenue source.

This structure is highly vulnerable due to delays in government subventions. When releases are late, universities rely on IGFs to sustain essential operations, effectively transferring short-term fiscal risk from the state to institutions with limited revenue flexibility.

A tech innovator, Hanu Fejiro Agbodjie, has donated AI-powered smart glasses to some hearing-impaired Nigerians, as part of efforts at expanding access to opportunities and social inclusion for persons living with disabilities.

Sodiq Olopade, a student of Bayero University, Kano (BUK), and Joylyn Jacobson, a video production assistant, were among the early beneficiaries who received the innovative hearing aid in company of their relatives in Lagos.

With a 270-degree speech recognition range, the AI-smart glasses are designed to capture spoken conversations and ambient sounds happening around the user; and transcribe them in real time into readable text that are displayed on the lenses, without requiring sign language interpreters or lip-reading.

The National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE) has begun a comprehensive review of the NCE Minimum Standards and curriculum to strengthen teacher education nationwide. The Executive Secretary of NCCE, Prof. Paulinus Okwelle, disclosed this at the inauguration of the review exercise at the Nasarawa State College of Education, Akwanga.

Okwelle said the review would address identified gaps, align teacher preparation with national priorities, global education trends and practical realities facing colleges of education. He explained that the exercise brought together teacher educators, policymakers, practitioners and development partners to enrich the review outcomes through shared expertise.

According to him, the revised curriculum will integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital competencies to prepare teachers for technology-driven classrooms and the future of work. “This forward-looking approach will position Nigerian teachers to operate confidently in technology-rich classrooms and align teacher preparation with international best practices and national development aspirations,” he said.

The Nigerian Universities Ranking Advisory Committee (NURAC) has applauded the Nigerian university system for its improved showing in the 2026 Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings by Subject, released on January 21.

In a historic milestone, 24 Nigerian universities featured in the rankings, positioning Nigeria as the most represented country in Sub-Saharan Africa. The assessment spans 11 subject areas, including Arts and Humanities, Business and Economics, Computer Science, Education Studies, Engineering, Law, Life Sciences, Medical and Health, Physical Sciences, Psychology, and Social Sciences.

Commenting on the outcome, Chairman of NURAC and former Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), Professor Emeritus Peter Okebukola, described the performance as clear evidence of Nigeria’s growing academic strength and resilience.

The digital age has ushered in a profound transformation across every sphere of human existence, and education has not been spared. Once upon a time, teachers were regarded as the sole custodians of knowledge, the gatekeepers of wisdom, and the primary transmitters of information. Pupils relied almost exclusively on their teachers for instruction, guidance, and intellectual nourishment.

Today, however, we inhabit a world where information is abundant, accessible at the click of a button, and technology permeates every classroom, lecture hall, and learning environment. This seismic shift demands a rethinking of traditional teaching roles, methodologies, and expectations.

In this piece, I seek to explore deeply the evolving responsibilities, challenges, and opportunities for teachers in the digital era. The task before educators is not merely to survive in this new landscape but to thrive, to harness the tools of technology while safeguarding the human essence of education.