Our Children Need Standard Books, Not a Publishers Ranking List

Every September in Nigeria, the same ritual plays out in homes across the country. Parents line up in markets and bookshops with a list in one hand and dwindling cash in the other. The list is from the school. The cash never stretches far enough.

So when the Federal Government says it wants to improve what’s on that list — better textbooks, fewer errors, tighter alignment with the curriculum — most Nigerians nod. Who would argue against better books?

The problem is not the ambition. It is the mechanism now being used to achieve it.

A new policy has quietly entered the education space. Under it, the government will not only vet textbooks, it will grade them. It will rank publishers. And it will narrow the pool of books officially recommended for classrooms across the country to a select few.

On paper, this looks like quality control. In practice, it looks like gatekeeping. And in a country with 60 million children in basic and secondary school, gatekeeping has consequences.

1. A Solution in Search of a Problem

For years, textbook approval in Nigeria has run through the National Educational Research and Development Council, NERDC. The mandate was straightforward: check the book against the curriculum. If it matches, it gets listed. No trophies, no league tables.

It was not a perfect system. Teachers still complained about errors. Distribution was uneven. But it was open. Dozens of publishers, including small indigenous presses in Ibadan, Enugu and Kano, could compete as long as their books met the standard.

Now the government wants to go further. Instead of pass/fail, we get scores. Instead of a directory, we get a podium. First place, second place, third.

What prompted the change? That is the first question no one has answered with data. If the old system was letting bad books into classrooms, show us the evidence. Which titles? Which subjects? Which years?

Policy without evidence is preference dressed as reform. Nigerians deserve the receipts before we upend an entire industry.

2. The Math Doesn’t Add Up

Consider scale. Sixty million learners. Hundreds of thousands of schools. Multiple subjects per class, updated every few years.

Now imagine telling that market that only a handful of publishers will carry the government’s seal of approval. Even the most efficient presses cannot print, warehouse and truck that volume to every LGA without delay.

What happens in the meantime? Scarcity. When supply tightens, price rises. And price is already the single biggest barrier between a Nigerian child and a textbook.

Publishers are also warning about cost. According to industry sources, assessment fees have jumped sharply under the new framework — from roughly N300 to N2,000 per page, plus large subject fees. For a house trying to get a full basic education catalog approved, estimates run into the hundreds of millions of naira.

That money does not vanish. It shows up later, on the price tag parents pay. Or it shows up as closed businesses.

Nigeria’s publishing ecosystem is not just a few big names. It is editors working from spare rooms. Illustrators in Yaba. Printers in Aba. Distributors who know which road to take when the rains come. A ranking system that crowns winners and erases the rest will hollow that ecosystem out at the moment we need more capacity, not less.

3. The Incentive Problem

There is another risk, and it is not theoretical.

Anytime government decides which private companies get to dominate a market worth billions, you create a magnet for influence. Even if no one pays a bribe, the mere possibility that a ranking can be lobbied for or against corrodes trust.

Parents will ask: was this book approved because it is good, or because its publisher is connected? Teachers will ask the same. Students will pay the price either way.

Other countries have faced this and chosen a different path. In many education systems, the state sets a clear floor: curriculum alignment, accuracy, production quality, price. Meet the floor, you’re in. No ranking, no public shaming, no artificial scarcity. The goal is not to pick champions. The goal is to keep bad books out.

Nigeria could learn from that.

4. What Was Missing From The Room

Major policy rarely survives contact with the people it affects unless those people were in the room when it was written.

Publishers were not meaningfully consulted. Neither were teachers who actually use the books, nor school owners managing tight budgets, nor parents already stretched by inflation.

When stakeholders raise red flags early, it is not obstruction. It is early warning. The government should treat it as such and go back to the table.

At LightRay! Media, we believe in two things at once: that Nigerian children deserve textbooks free of errors and politics, and that they deserve textbooks they can actually afford and find.

You cannot have the first without the second.

The Way Forward:

Suspend the ranking.

Keep rigorous assessment. Keep curriculum checks. Keep periodic reviews. But replace the podium with a doorway. Set transparent, measurable minimum standards. Any publisher whose book meets them gets approved. No hierarchy. No artificial winners.

That preserves competition. It protects jobs. It keeps more books in more places at prices more families can manage.

Education reform is not supposed to make the market smaller. It is supposed to make learning bigger.

Nigerian children do not need a ranking of publishers. They need a shelf full of good books, in every classroom, in every state, at a price their parents can pay.

That should be the only metric that matters.

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