Who’s afraid of King’s College rescue mission?

For decades, the public discourse surrounding national infrastructure in Nigeria has been trapped in a tragic binary: government inadequacy or outright privatisation. When a public asset deteriorates, we either watch it crumble under bureaucratic inertia or consider transferring it into commercial hands, often at the risk of pricing it out of reach for ordinary Nigerians. It is precisely within this false choice that much of the resistance to the Federal Government’s approved concession of King’s College, Lagos, to the King’s College Old Boys’ Association has emerged.

To anxious parents, sceptical trade unions and well-meaning commentators, the word concession understandably triggers a defensive reflex. It conjures images of corporate takeovers, soaring school fees and the commercialisation of a 116-year-old national institution. We should not simply dismiss those fears. They stem partly from a national history in which citizens have repeatedly watched public assets deteriorate, become mismanaged, or pass beyond their reach. Honesty also requires us to acknowledge other realities in this debate. Some interests thrive on institutional dysfunction. Any reform that introduces transparent management, independent audit and measurable accountability will inevitably threaten opaque, self-serving arrangements sustained by the status quo. We should not confuse those interests with parents, staff and citizens who have legitimate concerns about affordability, access and accountability. Neither should we pretend that every defence of the status quo is necessarily a defence of public education. Another problem, perhaps more subtle and ultimately more dangerous, is the normalisation of decline.

When an institution deteriorates slowly enough and for long enough, decline itself becomes the benchmark. Then, it becomes the new normal. A generation that has known King’s College primarily through ageing infrastructure, deteriorating facilities and constrained resources may understandably ask why significant change is necessary when students continue to perform respectably in WAEC and NECO examinations. Examination results alone cannot measure a great school. A great school is also its laboratories, libraries, classrooms, boarding school life, sports facilities, technology, teachers, traditions, culture, discipline, character formation and the physical environment in which young people are taught to imagine what they can become.

King’s College was not established merely to produce respectable examination results. It was built to produce excellence. Once a society forgets what excellence looks like, mediocrity begins to appear perfectly acceptable. We must respond to these different realities.

Before Nigerians decide whether this arrangement deserves support or rejection, we should look beyond the emotionally charged word concession and examine what is actually being proposed. The KCOBA intervention is not a commercial acquisition of King’s College. The Federal Government does not surrender ownership of the school or its land. What is proposed is a management arrangement under which King’s College would be managed by old boys through a legally constituted trust, with the trust assuming greater responsibility for the institution’s administrative, financial, and operational restoration. That distinction matters. This is not an attempt by outsiders to acquire King’s College. It is an attempt by those the school has raised to rescue it. There is something profoundly patriotic about alumni who could simply retreat into nostalgia, yet choose to mobilise their networks, resources, and expertise to restore the institution that helped make them who they are.

KCOBA has announced an ambitious N100bn endowment initiative intended to support the long-term restoration and development of the college. Consider what that represents. Private resources are being mobilised not to create another exclusive private school, but to restore a public institution without changing ownership. That should be sufficient reason to pause before condemning the model. The uncomfortable truth about public education funding in Nigeria is that King’s College competes for finite government resources alongside over one hundred Unity Schools and numerous tertiary institutions, against the background of enormous national demands and severe fiscal constraints. Every leaking roof, obsolete laboratory, deteriorating dormitory and outdated technology facility at King’s College must compete with other legitimate priorities for public funding. King’s College does not always win. The accumulated consequence is the erosion of quality we see today. The consequences of that erosion are not always cosmetic. In March 2025, a junior student died during a diphtheria outbreak at King’s College, while other students were hospitalised.

Parents had raised concerns about sanitary conditions and called for improvements to water, sanitation and hygiene facilities within the school. That tragedy should remind all of us that a school’s condition is not merely about peeling paint, ageing dormitories, or nostalgia for better days. At its most serious, institutional weakness can touch the health, safety and wellbeing of the children entrusted to it. No parent should have to accept deteriorating standards as the price of keeping King’s College public. Nor should preserving its public character require us to tolerate conditions that fall below what those children deserve. Leaving the college entirely dependent on annual federal budgetary allocations is, therefore, not necessarily the defence of public education, as its advocates would have us believe. Under current conditions, it can just as easily become a formula for managed decline.

Which brings us to the question critics of the concession ultimately have to answer: What is the alternative? It is not enough to say that the current proposal is imperfect.

Almost every serious institutional reform is. Those who reject this model must offer something more than objections. They must present a credible alternative capable of delivering the capital, governance discipline, institutional continuity, accountability and long-term stewardship required to restore King’s College and sustain it for another century. Simply returning to the arrangement that produced the current condition is not an alternative. Neither is hoping that next year’s federal budget will somehow solve problems accumulated over decades. The burden of proof therefore does not rest only with KCOBA. It also rests with those insisting that the existing structure should remain substantially unchanged. If there is a better model, present it. If there is a more credible way to mobilise the required resources while preserving King’s College as a national public institution, present it. Indefinite deterioration cannot reasonably be offered as the price of preserving public ownership. The KCOBA intervention should therefore be judged not by the fears some people attach to the word concession, but by what the arrangement actually preserves, changes and enables.

Does King’s College remain publicly owned?

Does it remain accessible to Nigerians across all socio-economic backgrounds?

Are admissions protected from capture?

Are fees subject to appropriate safeguards?

Is there independent financial oversight?

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Are conflicts of interest controlled?

Is management accountable?

Will academic and institutional standards improve?

Will the purpose and guiding principles on which the school was founded be preserved?

Will the red-brick buildings, laboratories, libraries, dormitories and playing fields actually be restored? Those are the questions that matter. Asking them does not weaken the case for the concession. It strengthens it. The strongest argument for KCOBA’s intervention is not: ‘Trust the Old Boys’. It is: ‘Build a governance structure that best serves King’s College, its mission and its pupils’. That is the opportunity before us.

The significance of the King’s College intervention also extends beyond one school. Nigeria desperately needs institutional models that sit between two failed extremes: total dependence on government bureaucracy on one side and outright commercial privatisation on the other. Public ownership and independent stewardship are not mutually exclusive. The government can retain ownership and public obligations while competent non-state institutions contribute capital, governance capacity, institutional memory and long-term stewardship. Nigeria would not be inventing such a principle.

Indeed, a comparable arrangement already exists closer to home. Since 2022, the Government College Ibadan Old Boys Association has operated under an agreement with the Oyo State Government to manage, operate, and develop Government College Ibadan, while the school remains publicly owned. Nor is Government College Ibadan alone. Other alumni-led arrangements exist elsewhere across the country, as alumni seek to halt the painful decline of their much-beloved alma maters. Comparable models also exist internationally, including educational institutions that remain publicly funded or publicly owned while operating through independently governed trusts and foundations subject to clear public-interest obligations. The important question, therefore, is not whether King’s College should remain public. It should. The real question is whether ‘public’ must continue to mean total dependence on an overstretched government bureaucracy for survival.

Those are not the same thing.

King’s College belongs to Nigeria. Its preservation is therefore a national responsibility. Nothing in that principle is inconsistent with allowing generations of men formed by the College to contribute their money, expertise, networks, and institutional loyalty to restoring it. Indeed, perhaps the greater tragedy would be to possess such an extraordinary reservoir of alumni capacity and refuse to use it while the institution itself continues to deteriorate. The old boys are not attempting to inherit King’s College. They already have an inheritance in it. What they are attempting now is to give something back.

In a subsequent article, we will examine the Government College Ibadan arrangement alongside other local examples and comparable international models, including the United Kingdom’s academy trust system and long-established alumni and foundation partnerships in the United States. The KCOBA proposal should not be judged as an isolated Nigerian experiment. It should be judged against the broader question confronting public institutions everywhere:

How do we preserve public access while introducing the governance, capital and accountability required to sustain excellence?

Animasaun is a King’s College Old Boy and technology entrepreneur