16/05/2026
How do you change a system that doesn't want to change?
You grew up inside it. You noticed something is wrong, but can't name it yet. You get older.
The teachers change. The buildings change.
The textbooks get new covers. But the content?
The same. The approach? The same. The priorities? Still the same.
People try to reform it. Committees are formed. Seminars are held. Reports are written. And then, nothing. The system absorbs every attempt at change and stays exactly what it was.
Ige been sitting with this question for a while now, particularly thinking about education I'm Cameroon, and honestly, across most of Africa.
We have an educational system that was not built to liberate. It was built to produce. To certify. And somewhere along the way, it became something worse; a business. A structure where the child's future is secondary to the institution's profit. Where embezzlement quietly eats what was meant for classrooms.
Where the people running the system have accepted it so deeply that refoms feels like a threat to them, not a gift.
And then a new generation arrives.
What do we tell them? Study hard? Get your certificate? Then what? Go abroad to access what education was always supposed to give you here?
That's the uncomfortable truth many of us do mt say out loud.
Change is possible. But it won't come from the top of a system that benefits from staying broken. It will come from 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐬 who decides to teach differently. From 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 who demand more. From young people who refuse to mistake a diploma for an education. From individuals who understand that the system produces what is eas designed to produce, and choose to build something different inside it, around it and in spite of it.
I don't have all the answers. But I think the first step is refusing to stop asking the question.
What will cause change? Maybe it's already started, with people who can't stop wondering why things are the way they are.
