“Optional” — Unwrapping A Country That Cannot Read
This post was originally written in May 2019 and has been in my drafts since then. Why am I publishing it now? Well, because I am “doing it afraid.” And I needed a sort of preamble to a new monthly essay series I am working on. You know, testing the waters and all that good stuff. It’s called “Shades of Thought”, but more on that later. For now, let’s talk about Nigeria’s comprehension — and by extension, education — problem.
I think I have figured it out. It’s not a pleasant realisation — in fact it is heartbreaking — but I feel like it’s incredibly useful that I came to this conclusion. Useful for my mental health, my soul and for coping with the shit show also known as Nigeria.
The realisation that has dawned on me and led to that [frankly] dramatic first paragraph is a simple one: beyond an obvious education and literacy problem, majority of the Nigerian populace suffer from a terrible, terrible lack of basic comprehension skills. I’ll tell you why I think so and you can bet your mother’s house that I have the receipts to back up my thesis.
First, some cold hard facts.
- Nigeria has consistently ranked in the top five countries globally with the highest number of out-of-school children in the past decade.
- In 2023, more than 75 per cent of Nigerian children aged seven to 14 years could not read simple sentences or solve basic mathematics problems.
- Several Nigerian states have literacy rates of 20% or less. As in, less than 20% of their population can read and/or write.
- Nigeria’s Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has gone on labour and welfare-related strikes almost every year since 1992.
- There are also no nationally-recognised teacher hiring guidelines and private school teaching is hardly regulated.
One more, for the culture.
- Between 2010 and now, no Nigerian government has ever allocated more than 10% of the annual budget toward education. UNESCO recommends 15–20% of the national budget be channeled toward education.
Clearly, Nigeria’s education (and comprehension) problem is ginormous. It has also been present for a long time and, in my not-so-humble opinion, we are not doing enough about it as a people because the negative effects are not immediately tangible.
“Of Nigeria’s entire population, about 59.9 per cent are literate (i.e. can read and write in a particular language). Let us take it for 60 per cent. Males constitute about 69.2% of this figure while the percentage for females is 49.7%. With this literacy rate, Nigeria, as in other fields of human development, ranks a lowly 144 of 162 on the global literacy index,” wrote former president Olusegun Obasanjo in a May 2019 op-ed.
Anyway, this poor comprehension thing became extremely obvious to me back in 2019. At that point in my ongoing romance with capitalism, I led communications for a young fintech startup — let’s call it Lime. This startup sold digital, no-collateral loans at the time, and about 80% of its target audience were Nigerians between the ages of 25 and 50. They were, for the most part, reasonably educated, employed (self and otherwise) or owned informal micro-businesses. Most importantly for Lime though, it’s potential customers had to own a smartphone. It was the only way to access Lime’s products.
This brings us to the keyword for this story: “Optional.” You see, during the sign-up process, a potential customer could enter a referral code — if they had been given one by whoever referred them to Lime. (Quick aside: I am not the only person that has never won a single thing from this “use my referral code” business, right? Right?)
Right inside that referral code box, in brackets and bold legible font, is the word “optional.” (Fun exercise: Tell me what you think this means in the comment section, or just leave me a note).
Shockingly, about 25% of the most frequent complaints my team received across various channels were from people complaining that they could not complete the sign-up process because they did not have referral codes. (Wait, what? That can’t be right.)
Now, these complaints ranged from very angry emails about being stuck at the referral code section for months, to repeat comments on Lime’s Facebook page, all saying one version of “Give me a referral code, I can’t complete my sign-up” or another.
Okay, maybe this was a design problem. Or the word. Or the placement of it. So, we made iterations and multiple variations of what was an already logical design (and word choice) were tested. Still, roughly a quarter of all complaints were still about this particular issue. We even turned it into a sentence: “Type referral code here, IF YOU HAVE ONE” (emphasis mine) and the effect of that was mild, at best. My content and marketing people know how important it is to track those referral metrics, don’t we?
This situation had me discombobulated for months. If thousands of people who supposedly have at least an halfway decent education struggle to understand or figure out what a word like “optional” means in context, then how far off are we as a people?
If we struggle with relatively basic comprehension skills, on such a massive scale, then how do we even begin to engage with ideas like self-awareness, mental health, feminism, climate change and political propaganda at scale? How much of the can have we been kicking down the road all these years? How can we become progressive as a society when we can’t even read properly?
Let’s assume you don’t know what a word means, can’t you find out? Open Google, ask someone, check a dictionary, something for fuck’s sake. Or am I tripping? This thing dey scatter all my head.
I cannot count how many times I have been pulled into the whirlwind of whatever Nigerian Twitter is angry about on the day, only to discover that all the furore stems from people not comprehending the difference between sarcasm and satire.
In December 2023, a friend was complaining bitterly to me about her teams’ frustrations with employment loan applicants. Even with clearly listed application steps and requirements (in multiple languages and formats too), Nigerians still filled in the wrong information or just straight did rubbish.
My former landlord once made a sign that read: “Do NOT block this entrance. DO NOT PARK ANY VEHICLE IN FRONT OF THE GATE” and hung it on the entrance gate. Guess what? Nigerians regularly parked their vehicles in front of the gate and blocked the entrance.
Anyone who has hired for anything less than a mid-level role in the past five years will tell you that our graduates struggle to comprehend and follow instructions. Our politicians and public officers regularly bamboozle us with big numbers and abstract statements because they know it works. (Anyone remember the aftermath of #EndSARS?)
Our educational system has clusterfucked so many of us and we don’t even realise it. Collectively, our critical thinking processes are all screwed up, groupthink is the norm outside the elite and upper-middle class, and we constantly underemphasise just how regressive many of our societal ideals and guardrails are as Nigerians. Our leaders have been complicit in the demise of our collective enlightenment and the future is being destroyed right now, in the present.
All of this feels quite hopeless but I have to say a big thank you to all the libraries, book clubs and reading clubs out there. The nonprofit and advocacy organisations, edtech startups and people investing in education and working to fix this deeply disturbing issue are worthy of all the praise they don’t get. We should all take inspiration from them and start doing what we can in our little corners of the world to solve this problem. (Even if it is simply calling attention to it by sharing this article with everyone you know).
Maybe this will change in our lifetime. Maybe it won’t. But the least we can do is be honest with ourselves about where we really are and where we need to be.
If you are an entrepreneur, entertainer, creator, politician, marketer or anyone trying to reach Nigerians outside the 1% and upper-middle class, factor this into your marketing and communications strategy. What works for Nigerians that have Twitter accounts and international passports will not work for those who do not have smartphones and never owned an ATM card. You have to optimise for this comprehension problem, maybe even bake it into the design of your product and/or service, for it to be truly effective.
Nothing is compulsory,
Akindare.
