The Ministry sends us ₦47,000 per term. Here is where it goes, and here is what my children remember three years later.
What you're looking at
Four bars showing how our term budget divides. The three tall blue bars on the left are printed materials — worksheets the children fill in once and throw away, textbooks they cannot write in, testing forms that go to the district office. The small orange bar on the right is chalk. The baseline is the floor of the classroom. The annotation points to the only expenditure my students remember three years after they leave my room.
Why I drew it this way
I made the printed-material bars all the same cold blue because they are the same thing to a five-year-old: paper you are not allowed to touch wrong, paper that teaches you to fear making a mark. I made the chalk bar orange because it is warm — it is the thing that lets me draw the sun sixty times until they understand that it is not "up," it is "center." I put the annotation low and direct because this is not a subtle point. The Ministry spends ₦45,000 on permanence and ₦2,000 on the tool that actually enters a child's memory.
What it argues
The budget is upside-down. We spend on artifacts — worksheets to file, textbooks to inventory, forms to prove we taught — and nearly nothing on the act of teaching itself, which is drawing a thing badly in front of a child until the child can draw it back to you. The diagram argues that we have mistaken the record of teaching for the teaching.
What I left out
I left out teacher salaries, furniture, and building costs — not because they do not matter, but because this chart is about instructional spending only, the money meant to carry knowledge into a child's head. I also left out the cost of the battered notebook we teachers share at lunch to swap lesson sketches. That notebook cost ₦150 and has taught more children than ₦28,000 in worksheets ever will.