President Bola Tinubu once drove a taxi through American streets to pay for his own schooling. He shared this detail publicly, speaking about the hustle it took to fund his education in the United States and the jobs he picked up along the way to make ends meet.
That personal history, Tinubu says, is not far from his mind as president. He points to those years as the reason he feels strongly about opening up educational opportunities for Nigerian children, connecting his own grinding experience to the policy commitments he is making now.
It is a rare moment of personal candour from a sitting president, and it raises a question worth sitting with: if the man at the top knows exactly what it costs a young person to chase an education with no safety net, what will that actually look like in the budgets and classrooms back home?
Originally published by AllAfrica.