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active in Lagos State. It was only for the low-fee private schools, like the ones in Makoko, and others that existed all over Lagos State, including the rural areas. Why was it formed? In 2000, he told me, there was a two-pronged attack to close down private schools like his. On one front was the posh private school association, the Association of Proprietors of Private Schools, which represented schools charging anything from 10 to 100 times what his school charged. APPS complained to the government about the low quality in schools like his, which prompted the government to move to close down the low-fee private schools. “We are still fighting that battle now,” he said. “We are trying to give the people who are not so rich the privilege of having some decent education.” With the association, they fought the closure, and with the change of government they were neglected for a bit. But then a few months earlier, the government of Lagos again issued an edict saying that they must be closed down. They were fighting it and had received a six-month stay of execution. Meanwhile, the association wrote to all the kings—as the local chiefs are called—in Lagos State telling them about the government’s threat, saying 600,000 children would be pushed out of school and thousands of staff laid off if the government proceeded. “When you have a headache,” said BSE, “the solution is not to cut off the head! If government has a problem with us, then we can work together to help us improve, not cut us off completely!” But there was no self-pity. “We find it impossible to meet all their regulations; we can’t possibly afford them all.” As we walked around the shantytown, he related that he had written to the Lagos education department saying that instead of hassling the private schools, why didn’t it help them with a revolving loan fund? He had received, he said, no reply.
    Over the next few days, I visited many of the association schools. There was a school in which French was the medium of instruction, with a principal from Benin serving migrant children from the surrounding Francophone countries who will return home for secondary school. It was the largest school, with 400 children; it was a two-story wood building (called a “story” building in Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa) built on stilts. The oldest school, Legacy, founded in 1985, was also a “story” building, with an upper floor of planks that creaked and groaned as we walked on it, and through which we could see the classes below. When I visited at 5:00 p.m., a teacher was still teaching upstairs, voluntarily helping the senior children prepare for their examinations. The proprietor here had started the school by going door-to-door, encouraging parents to send their children to school—there being no accessible public school then, and he wanted his community to be literate. Then he started charging 10 kobo (that is, 10 hundredths of a naira) per day; later he worked on making parents pay weekly fees; as his numbers grew, he asked them to give what they could to help him run the place. As his school became established, he moved to charging by the month and then by the term. He, like everyone, found it really difficult to get the fees from parents, and he, like everyone else, offered free tuition to many of his children.
    Were his teachers qualified? I asked. He began by telling me that he trained them himself; at the end of each term, they had workshops to increase the academic standard, and that was fine. Then he added: “We don’t cherish qualifications, we cherish your output. Can you perform? That is the important thing, not whether you have certificates!” He told a story about how someone came for a job, with an “impressive BSc in mathematics,” and he asked him: “OK, so my grandfather is 80 and in 8 years time he will be eight times your age. How old are you now?” I quickly butted in with what seemed the obvious answer, showing