Akwa Ibom’s NECO Slide: What Went Wrong With The State’s Education Ambition?
By JULIET EKANEM
A Dramatic Fall in One Year
AKWA Ibom State has recorded a sharp decline in its performance in the 2026 National Examinations Council Senior School Certificate Examination, placing 36th among Nigeria’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.
Only 37.42 per cent of candidates who sat the examination obtained at least five credits, including English Language and Mathematics. Specifically, 7,754 of the 20,720 candidates who sat the examination met the benchmark. Only Sokoto performed worse, with 26.82 per cent.
The latest figures become more striking when compared with the state’s recent record.
In 2025, Akwa Ibom ranked 12th nationally after 13,090 of 19,513 candidates met the same benchmark, representing 67.08 per cent. The state had also recorded 67.32 per cent in 2024.
Consequently, the 2026 result represents a decline of almost 30 percentage points from the previous year’s performance.
A Southern State at the Bottom
The decline also stands out within the southern region.
Akwa Ibom became the lowest-performing South-south state in the 2026 ranking. Rivers, by comparison, recorded 56.38 per cent, while Cross River posted 62.18 per cent.
Elsewhere in the South-east, Enugu recorded 54.52 per cent, Anambra 69.70 per cent and Edo 71.18 per cent.
Meanwhile, several states from the South-east and South-south occupied the upper end of the national table.
Abia led the country for the second consecutive year with 81.78 per cent. Ebonyi followed with 81.03 per cent, while Delta ranked fourth with 75.17 per cent. Imo and Bayelsa also made the top nine, recording 74.10 per cent and 73.92 per cent respectively.
The contrast raises an important question about why neighbouring states produced significantly different outcomes in the same examination year.
Money & the Learning Question
Attention now turns to education financing.
It was reported that the administration of Governor Umo Eno received at least ₦2.934 trillion in revenue during its first 38 months in office. At the same time, an analysis found that detailed capital-expenditure information was no longer readily available in the state’s public financial documents, making it difficult to independently trace some spending, particularly in education.
The government, however, has continued to fund specific education-related interventions.
In July, it announced the approval of ₦1.968 billion to cover examination fees for students in public basic and secondary schools. That intervention can reduce the financial burden on families, but examination-fee support alone cannot determine whether students receive enough instructional support before sitting for external examinations.
The state’s 2026 budget allocated ₦94.41 billion to education from a total budget of ₦1.158 trillion, amounting to 8.15 per cent. It was reported that this was below the 26 per cent benchmark associated with Nigeria’s National Policy on Education and UNESCO recommendations.
Yet, the comparison must be handled carefully.
Abia and Ebonyi allocated larger proportions of their 2026 budgets to education, at 19.93 per cent and 19.86 per cent, while Delta allocated 11.98 per cent. All three states also ranked substantially above Akwa Ibom in the NECO results.
Those figures, however, do not establish a direct causal relationship between budget share and examination performance. They instead raise questions about how education resources are prioritised, deployed and translated into classroom outcomes.
The Roadmap Under Scrutiny
Another issue is the Akwa Ibom Strategic Education Roadmap 2020–2030.
The roadmap was developed after an education summit and was designed to provide a long-term framework for improving the state’s education system. Its stated objectives include improving education quality, strengthening support infrastructure, enhancing educational processes and developing an appropriately skilled workforce.
More specifically, the roadmap identified weaknesses involving teacher numbers, training, deployment, teaching aids, counselling, motivation and welfare.
It identified a student-teacher ratio of 120:1 as one of the structural problems and recommended the recruitment and training of 2,000 secondary-school teachers and 3,000 primary-school teachers as part of its short-term interventions. Its longer-term target was to reduce the student-teacher ratio to 40:1 by 2030.
Now, with the roadmap already beyond its initial 2020–2024 short-term phase, the 2026 NECO results offer another measurable point for assessing progress.
The examination result does not, by itself, prove that the roadmap failed. However, it creates a basis for asking whether its priorities have translated into sustained improvements in learning outcomes.
The Unanswered Government Questions
Against that backdrop, the state’s response becomes important.
Commissioner for Education Ubong Umoh was approached for an explanation of the poor result. Information was sought after on possible learning and examination-preparedness challenges, teacher shortages, particularly in English and Mathematics, spending on teacher recruitment and training, instructional materials and school infrastructure, as well as planned interventions before the 2027 examinations.
The commissioner had not responded to the calls and media enquiry when the report was filed.
That leaves several issues unresolved.
Was the 2026 result an exceptional examination-year setback? Did particular subjects or categories of schools account for much of the decline? Have teacher deployment and training improved since the roadmap was introduced? And, perhaps most importantly, are current education investments producing measurable improvements in what students actually learn?
Beyond One Examination
The sharp movement from 67.08 per cent in 2025 to 37.42 per cent in 2026 deserves attention precisely because examination results provide only one measure of an education system.
Still, such a steep change cannot easily be ignored.
The figures have now placed renewed focus on teacher quality, curriculum delivery, instructional resources, education financing and policy implementation in Akwa Ibom.
For the state, the immediate challenge is therefore not merely to improve its position on the next NECO table. It is to determine what produced the 2026 decline and whether the reforms introduced under its long-term education strategy are reaching classrooms in ways that students can demonstrate in measurable outcomes.
