By Maroof Asudemade

The images in a viral video tell a disturbing story about the state of public-school infrastructure in Oyo State: roofing structures are exposed and collapsing, walls are badly weathered, windows and doors are damaged or missing, and some school buildings are surrounded by overgrown vegetation. These are not the conditions expected in schools serving children in the 21st century.

The responsibility for this situation cannot be divorced from the administration of Governor Seyi Makinde. For more than seven years, education has featured prominently in the governor’s budget speeches and public pronouncements. The administration says it raised education’s share of the state budget substantially, while its own 2025 appropriation law provided billions of naira across the education sector, including ₦20 billion for the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and almost ₦4 billion for SUBEB. Yet the government’s own documents undermine any attempt to suggest that the infrastructure problem has been solved.

In its 2025 budget speech, the Makinde administration acknowledged that at least 100 secondary schools remained dilapidated and promised that they would be fixed. There is also money beyond the state’s annual appropriation. Oyo’s Medium-Term Expenditure Framework identifies over ₦3 billion annually in UBEC funds for SUBEB, alongside other federal intervention resources, while UBEC confirms that the Federal Government provides matching grants to states for basic education. That makes the condition shown in this video difficult to explain away as simply a question of insufficient resources.

The indictment against the Makinde administration is therefore not that it has made no budgetary provision for education; it is that the huge figures announced for education have not translated sufficiently into the physical transformation of many schools.

A government cannot continue to celebrate billions allocated on paper while children sit in classrooms whose roofs, walls, windows and other facilities are visibly deteriorating. Education is more than teacher recruitment, examination results, policy speeches and budget figures. A child deserves a safe classroom, a sound roof, functional windows, decent furniture and an environment conducive to learning.

The footage raises a fundamental accountability question for Governor Makinde: after seven years of budgetary claims and access to federal intervention funds, why are public-school buildings in Oyo still allowed to deteriorate to this extent?

If education is truly a priority, the evidence should not be confined to budget documents and government press releases. It should be visible in the classrooms where Oyo’s children learn.