THE CHALLENGE WITH RANKING BOOKS

The new National Book Ranking Policy may cause unintended damage to the nation’s publishing industry, writes BOLAJI ADEBIYI

Another storm is gathering in Nigeria’s education sector. At the end of April this year, the Federal Ministry of Education promulgated the National Book Ranking Policy, which limits approved textbooks to the top seven per subject for three years and bans the use of unranked books in primary and secondary schools, regardless of prior licensing. 

According to the ministry, which regulates the country’s educational standards, the ranking system aims to significantly reduce the excessive number of textbooks currently in circulation in many schools, a situation that has often created confusion for teachers, students and parents. It said the reform also aims to bring greater transparency, order and quality assurance into the textbook approval process while aligning Nigeria’s education system with international best practices in instructional material standardisation.

It tasked the National Educational Research and Development Council with ranking, in addition to its book licensing responsibilities, and mandated that unranked textbooks would not be permitted in the nation’s primary and secondary schools. Under the policy, publishers were to submit their samples for assessment, grading and ranking by 18 July 2026, with the policy taking effect in September.

The ranking policy, which seeks to ensure quality and standardisation in the nation’s primary and secondary education sector, comes a few months after the controversial National Curriculum Reforms, which rejigged schools’ syllabi and necessitated an extensive review of the content of existing textbooks. Stakeholders had complained that the curriculum review lacked sufficient consultation, even as the transitional period for implementation was said to be short.

Now, the ranking policy seems to be bubbling over in the stew, as one of the major stakeholders in the education sector, the Nigerian Publishers Association, is crying foul! Its grievance: the policy will confer an undue commercial advantage on a few publishing firms, limit access to quality textbooks, increase their cost, destabilise the publishing industry, and lead to job losses.

It has already prompted a petition to the National Assembly, which is being invited to halt the policy’s implementation and to institute an enquiry into its rationale to determine whether it would not contradict the Federal Government’s goal of increasing access to affordable education.

Ordinarily, a policy aimed at ensuring that textbooks accessible to the Nigerian child are of the highest quality ought not to be enmeshed in controversy and should be welcomed by all stakeholders. However, consensus is difficult to achieve without adequate consultation among the interested parties. It appears that in the instant case, little effort was made to secure buy-in from relevant industry stakeholders before the policy was promulgated. 

Although the implementation agency, the NERDC, has set 18July 2026 as the deadline for the submission of textbooks for assessment, grading, and ranking, it is not too late to engage the relevant stakeholders and take on board the concerns expressed. Certainly, there are merits to some of the worries that have been expressed, and a careful examination of them could yield a tinkering of the policy.

The complaint that ranking would confer an undue commercial advantage on a few financially solvent firms, to the detriment of many others, warrants close scrutiny. It is a constitutional requirement that government policy must protect the general interest and must not confer an advantage on a few persons. Without doubt, the assessment, grading and ranking fees regime, which increased from N200 to N2,000 per page, amounting to over N200 million, is excessive and is likely to crowd out smaller firms that have been in business for many years and employ thousands of Nigerians. 

The implications are that the few firms that are ranked will not engage in charitable activities and will pass on the prohibitive costs to consumers, while the publishers that fall by the wayside may close shop, adding to the already saturated unemployment market. For a government that aims to expand access to affordable education and to reduce unemployment in the polity, this is hardly an option.

The case for reviewing this policy is strengthened by the absence of evidence that the existing assessment system is no longer fit for purpose. While it could be enriched, its current advantage of providing a variety of high-quality books for the over 60 million Nigerian children in basic and secondary schools ought not to be sacrificed on the altar of a presumed high ranking.

Besides, it should not be the responsibility of a regulatory agency to determine consumers’ choices by prescribing specific products for consumption. This policy, for instance, amounts to the Nigerian Communications Commission ranking GSM providers and limiting their users to two of the several it had licensed. It will also raise eyebrows if the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control ranks pharmaceutical companies and limits consumers’ choices to the products of a few selected companies.

Nigeria operates within a global community; therefore, its policies should conform to best practice. Globally, leading education systems emphasise textbook evaluation, approval, and recommendation rather than ranking textbooks in a way that confers commercial advantage on a select few publishers.

Countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, India, South Africa, and Ghana generally maintain systems that ensure textbooks meet prescribed educational standards while preserving competition, diversity of learning materials, teacher choice, and affordability.

These systems recognise that educational quality improves when schools and teachers can choose from a range of approved textbooks that meet established standards, rather than being compelled—directly or indirectly—to rely on a limited number of highly ranked titles. The proposed ranking policy clearly departs from this widely accepted approach and risks creating market distortions, reducing textbook diversity, limiting professional choice, and concentrating educational content in the hands of a few providers.

Meanwhile, there is also the matter of the policy’s timing, set to take effect later in September. Coming a few months after the government reviewed the National Education Curriculum, it threatens to disrupt the spirited efforts by publishers to align their textbooks with the new syllabi. Publishers have already committed enormous financial resources to curriculum alignment, content revision, editorial development, teacher support materials, printing, and distribution planning.

Introducing a disruptive ranking regime at this critical stage will create uncertainty, discourage investment, and impose additional burdens on stakeholders already adapting to major curriculum reforms. Educational stability should be prioritised during curriculum transitions.

The appropriate course of action in the circumstances is for the education ministry to pause and invite the relevant stakeholders to review the policy, which, though well-intentioned, may cause unintended harm to the sector.

Adebiyi, a Fellow of the Nigerian Guild of Editors, writes from Abuja.