Both rich and poor parents want the best possible future for their children. In addition, school-going children are under great pressure – despite inadequate facilities – to acquire good grades, secure higher school or university admissions and achieve qualifications to improve their life chances. These aspirations and expectations, in a context where high-quality education is scarce, pushes people to seek advantages, even if this means engaging in improper or illegitimate practices.
According to Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer, 16 per cent of African citizens who used school services paid a bribe in the previous year. Across the five key public services surveyed, the poorest people were twice as likely to pay a bribe as the richest people. For Nigeria, bribery rates for those using public schools in the previous 12 months increased from 25 per cent in 2015 to 32 per cent in 2019. A survey conducted in 2019 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on bribery in Nigeria found that bribes paid for passing examinations at university/school or improving grades accounted for 3 per cent of all payments made by citizens to public officials. Of the six types of private sector employees cited in the study, teachers in private schools had most commonly been given bribes over the 12 months prior to the survey.
Bribery in the education sector changes according to context and does not affect all people equally. In some cases, bribe-giving takes place in response to demands from teachers and education providers. In others, it occurs due to unwritten expectations that poor levels of remuneration ought to be topped up or paid by parents when the government fails to pay salaries in publicly-funded schools. Notably, bribe offers may also occur in the context of local gift-giving practices. Sometimes the distinctions between these motives and dynamics are clear, but it can be difficult to isolate them when they occur amid systemic dysfunction or informality.
With the average size of bribes for passing grades in Nigeria estimated at 5,051 naira in 2019, bribes and other informal payments for school services amount to an added tax that is most detrimental for those who can least afford to pay. Due to underinvestment and slipping standards in public schools, many Nigerian families turn to private providers. However, when parents are asked to pay bribes in addition to the higher cost of private schooling, their children can be put at further risk of unrealized potential and lifelong poverty if the bribe demands are unmet.
In such a context of gross underinvestment in public schools, limited choices and the stiff competition for places, poor checks and weak oversight, providers of education services are presented with routine opportunities to extort or demand bribes from parents and other service users. This situation may also lead to parents offering bribes as a remedy for an under-resourced and severely skewed learning environment, where merit and hard work are not the sole determinants of success. Thus, petty bribery practices in schools can become a symptom of several underlying and interconnected political and socio-economic problems, which then combine with the nature of high-stakes assessment systems (i.e. single national examinations) to create perverse incentives in an inefficient system that fails the majority of Nigerians and sabotages development efforts.
