Last week, the Nigerian government through the Federal Ministry of Education announced its decision to hand over the management of Kings College, Lagos to its Old Boys Association. Under a public-private partnership, the Old Boys Association said its community was ready to put together 100 billion naira to upgrade the school infrastructure and ensure a world-class learning experience for the students. The decision to however hand over the school to the Old Boys Association has produced uproar and a standoff between old boys, workers, parents, the ministry and workers’ union. Angry parents and teachers responded with protests and barricaded the entrance to the 117-year-old school, preventing members of the King’s College Old Boys Association from holding a scheduled press conference. This is despite the Old Boys Association and Ministry of Education saying the institution remains a public national school and that what would change is the framework through which it is managed, maintained, financed and developed.
On the surface, the intervention of Old Boys Association appears to be a good thing considering the immense challenges facing the Nigerian education sector and the continued decline seen across educational standards and the school in particular. In addition, the re-assurance on intent from the association as well as the ministry should ordinarily suffice in assuring the various stakeholders that this move was in the best interest of the children, the school and the country at large. However, all of these fell flat and the change was still resisted.
While there have been various takes on education partnerships arising from this event, I believe there is a deeper conversation to be had – the resistance to change despite best intentions. This is what this week’s episode is exploring as there are lessons in there for leaders and organisations. Specifically, I am looking at what gets said and what does not when workers resist organisational change despite the best intention of the people, policies and initiatives backing them and how leaders can navigate this resistance.
What was said when workers resisted the organisational change
One thing that emerged strongly from the King’s college protests was the visible demand to reverse the concession. Workers under the Joint Workers Council of the Federal Ministry of Education demanded the immediate reversal of the Federal Government’s decision, refusing to recognise any resumption of academic activities in any Federal Unity College nationwide until the demand was met. To back up this demand, some of the protesting teachers raised their concerns that the public private partnership was an arrangement that the Old Boys were employing to disguise their plan to eventually buy over the school. After which, they will then strategically edge out the children from indigent background and turn the legacy school into a privileged and elitist one for themselves and their cronies.
Furthermore, some other protesters expressed their displeasure with the part of the notice from the federal ministry of education which said that teachers who were displeased with the new arrangement were free to seek alternative teaching opportunities in Lagos State. This provision was interpreted by some of these protesting teachers as a plan to replace them again as part of a bigger strategy to change the overall nature and presentation of the school. A third concern was that if the concession stood, it could pave the way for similar arrangements at other Federal Unity Colleges, effectively opening the door to the gradual transfer of public education institutions into private hands. All these concerns though valid appear to only tell one part of the story.
What was left unsaid but was equally important
If you are familiar with negotiation and conflict resolution work, you might already know that oftentimes, what gets presented as a demand list in a protest is not a diagnostic tool but a negotiated construct. It is assembled to hold a coalition together rather than to map every grievance inside it. This happens because a demand list has to do two jobs at once: it must be specific enough to negotiate over, and broad enough that everyone inside the coalition can stand behind the same words even though each group arrived at the protest carrying a different private concern.
What gets presented as a demand list in a protest is not a diagnostic tool but a negotiated construct. It is assembled to hold a coalition together rather than to map every grievance inside it.
The mistake leaders can make in trying to understand the reason for change resistance, however, is to treat the stated objection on a protest demand list as the actual and only objection(s) without checking to see if there are other unsaid concerns. A useful concept here is that of Fisher and Ury in negotiation which draws distinction between positions and interests. Fisher and Ury describe a position as what someone says they want and an interest as why they want it. As it turns out, interests are almost always more numerous, more human, and more negotiable than the position suggests. Leaving them unaddressed can however be costly for achieving a resolution and the desired outcomes. This is because they are the root cause of continued internal resistance even when outward agreement has been achieved.
The concerns beneath the requests
For those protesting, the chants may have said “reverse the concession” and the concerns as previously stated. However, the very nature of those concerns reveal things that are much deeper. A few of them are highlighted below:
- Lack of trust: The fact that both the Old Boys Association and the Federal Ministry of Education stated their intentions and desired outcomes for this arrangement, yet these stakeholders still doubted their intentions shows an evident lack of trust. Sociological work on institutional trust treats trust not as a response to a single statement of intent but as an accumulated judgment built from repeated prior experience with an institution’s follow-through. Nigerians have watched enough public-private partnerships promise fall through the cracks that scepticism toward a new one becomes understandable. Add this to a governance environment where the word “concession” has, in other sectors, become shorthand for assets quietly changing hands with limited public accountability, and you will start to understand why the demand went as far as asking the government to spell out what concession actually means.
Sociological work on institutional trust treats trust not as a response to a single statement of intent but as an accumulated judgment built from repeated prior experience with an institution’s follow-through. Nigerians have watched enough public-private partnerships promise fall through the cracks that scepticism toward a new one becomes understandable.
- Issues of power: There could also be power dynamics concerns hiding in the resistance when things are considered from the angle of Weber’s work on power and authority. For instance, some teachers see the old boys’ insistence on formal control as a demonstration of what wealth, connection and privilege can command, rather than as a demonstration of care for the school. Beyond this, there is also the consequential change in the relational dynamics between the school’s governance and the old boys. Historically, the old boys have operated in a supportive, almost auxiliary capacity, offering mentorship, career guidance and periodic funding, while day-to-day authority over the school remained with government and its appointed staff. Under the new arrangement the relationship reverses; the old boys move from a supportive role into one of control and those who previously held day-to-day authority will now find themselves answering to the old boys.
- Fear of losing a sense of identity and belonging: Some of these teachers have spent many years at the school and developed a sense of identity linked to the school. The thought of being told they can find another school if they do not like the new arrangement may therefore be threatening to their sense of identity and belonging. Tajfel and Turner’s social identity theory offers an insight into what this can look like.
People do not only belong to organisations they derive part of their sense of self from them. When a change signals that the in-group’s status, legitimacy, or moral standing is under question, even implicitly, resistance becomes a form of identity defence rather than a policy disagreement.
- Undervalued and not being heard: When issues like this come up, the first set of places to look include how those involved feel that they may not have been heard in coming up with the vision or operationalising it. The fact that the old boys went ahead with such a decision and were met with this level of resistance suggests stakeholders like teachers may be feeling that their voices were not heard in the matter. This may then be seen as not being valued in the bigger scheme of things, a thing that has long been of concern for teachers within the Nigerian education sector.
- Fear of changing from the “familiar and safe”: For many the familiar feels safe and can be seen to be better that the promised better which is unfamiliar and feels unsafe. Samuelson and Zeckhauser’s in their work on status quo bias found that people will defend a known arrangement (status quo) even when a proposed alternative is objectively better on paper, because the downside of an unfamiliar new arrangement is more vivid and more personally costly to imagine than the upside of a good one. A teacher who has worked at Kings college for years knows exactly what that structure guarantees, however imperfectly. However, no one has yet shown them, with the same certainty, what the promised old boys’ structure guarantees.
People will defend a known arrangement (status quo) even when a proposed alternative is objectively better on paper, because the downside of an unfamiliar new arrangement is more vivid and more personally costly to imagine than the upside of a good one.
The concerns are not one-sided
The old boys, for their part, are not backing down either, and their reasons deserve a similar scrutiny. In the same public exchange that produced this dispute, one old boy pointed to staff reportedly using a water system donated by alumni to run a private fish farm as evidence of resource misuse. Another old boy noted the quick degradation of the newly donated, refurbished and renovated infrastructure pointing to a wider maintenance failure in the school. However, beneath their concerns also lies something deeper:
- The desire to protect something that they care about: For many old boys, King’s College is not simply an institution they once attended. It is where a formative part of their identity was built, and watching that identity erode is not a detached, philanthropic concern. It is closer to watching a family home fall into disrepair. That emotional stake helps explain both the size of their financial commitment and their impatience with a management structure they no longer trust to protect it.
- Lack of faith in the current leadership to restore the original vison or take it forward to the next level: Decades of renovating buildings, sports pitches and laboratories only to watch them degrade once the old boys’ attention moved elsewhere has understandably eroded confidence that the existing management structure can sustain, let alone build on, what has already been given. Whether or not that loss of confidence is entirely fair to the staff currently running the school day to day, it is the lived experience the old boys are responding to, and it is difficult to keep funding a structure you no longer believe can hold onto what you fund it with.
- Fear of losing a pedigree that gives them some kind of ego and identity boost: King’s College carries a particular status in Nigeria’s educational history which matters for those who have been through it. This status is linked to the quality of education historically derived there and the social standing and life outcomes of those who have passed through it. As such, being an old boy of a declining institution carries a different social weight than being an old boy of a thriving one. It would be naïve to assume this plays no part in the association’s urgency. Protecting the school’s standing is, in part, also protecting what that standing continues to say about everyone who passed through it.
What both sides may be missing
Both sides, in protecting and defending their own position, may also be missing some important things:
- The bigger socioeconomic issue of poverty generally and poor teacher pay specifically which may be influencing why teachers are doing fishing with school resources. Public sector teaching salaries in Nigeria remain among the lowest of any professional civil service track. Therefore, it is not surprising to see a teacher earning that wage, looking at unused capacity sitting inside the school compound and finding a way to make it work for them. Of course, this does not excuse the misuse of donated resources. However, treating that misuse purely as evidence of poor character, rather than also as a visible symptom of a difficult socioeconomic environment means the old boys may be missing out appreciating the complexity of the issue at hand and the multi-dimensional approach to solving it. While the old boys might the seeing the situation from an ethical perspective, the teachers might be seeing it from survival perspective. Similarly, the teachers and unions may be missing something about the old boys’ position. Where staff may see the push for formal authority as an entitled assertion of wealth and privilege, it can just as reasonably be read as a rational response to a structural problem that has repeated for forty years – an association that funds outcomes it has no authority to protect. The old boys’ impatience with four decades of renovate-and-watch-it-decay is not simply donor fatigue. It is what tends to happen when a funder has no control over the party responsible for maintaining what it funds. Reading that pattern only as arrogance, rather than also as an unresolved governance failure, would be an incomplete diagnosis.
- The need to examine the self (intents and actions) because we cannot fix others if we do not fix ourselves first. It is easier to name what someone else is protecting than to ask the same question of yourself. The old boys have not asked, at least not publicly, whether their frustration is really about incompetence, or whether it is also ego or about grief, watching something that shaped who they are, quietly come undone under someone else’s watch. The unions have also not asked, at least publicly, whether some of their resistance is really about defending the school’s future, or whether some of it is also about defending their own continuity within it. Both explanations may be true at once. What is missing on every side is not more information about the other party. It is the discipline to turn the same question inward.
- Who is getting hurt the most in all these disagreements – the children and their families.
Every week this dispute drags on is a week of instructional time that King’s College students, and students across every unity college that joined the sympathy strike, do not get back. When considered against the deterioration in quality of education already evident in the school and other unity schools in Nigeria, this should be deeply worrisome. All sides in this dispute say they are acting for the children. Yet the students are the one party with no seat at the table, no union, and no press conference, and it is worth asking, plainly, whether either side has actually asked them what they are experiencing while the adults argue over who should be in charge.
What leaders driving change can glean from these
For leaders navigating their own version of this, be it a restructuring, an acquisition, a governance handover, whatever it is, the place to start is the same place this piece started: with the discipline of translating a position into its interests before responding to it, the way the sections above have just done with a single demand to “reverse the concession.” Many leaders may be tempted to skip that translation and respond to the position directly and that is where the following transferable lessons come in.
- Understanding that resistance to change is frequently resistance to a threat that has attached itself to the change, not resistance to the change itself. Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory identifies three basic psychological needs that, when threatened, reliably produce defensive or oppositional behaviour: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy is threatened when decisions are made about people rather than with them, as happened when the concession was signed before staff were consulted. Competence is threatened when a change implies that the current way of running things, and therefore the people who ran it, was inadequate, a threat visible in how personally teachers received the old boys’ criticism of maintenance standards. Relatedness is threatened when a restructuring disrupts existing relationships and belonging, which is exactly what a possible transfer to Lagos State schools represented for teachers who had built their professional identity at King’s College. Leaders driving change should examine which of these three needs their specific decision puts under threat, and address that need directly, rather than assuming a general reassurance about outcomes will cover all three at once.
- Understanding what happens once individual fears become collective resistance. A single individual’s concern in an organisation might be managed quietly. The same concern, shared across a workforce and given a common banner, becomes a movement capable of shutting down an organisation nationwide within days. Leaders who wait until resistance has organised itself into a coalition are negotiating with something much harder to move than the individual fears that built it. And by then, the demand on the table is protecting the coalition’s unity as much as it is protecting anyone’s actual interest. The earlier a leader can reach people while their fears are still individual, the more room there is to address what is actually true for each of them rather than what an entire coalition can agree to say in public.
Leaders who wait until resistance has organised itself into a coalition are negotiating with something much harder to move than the individual fears that built it. And by then, the demand on the table is protecting the coalition’s unity as much as it is protecting anyone’s actual interest.
- Recognising that consultation done after a decision is announced is not the same exercise as consultation done before it, even when it covers the same ground. The two-week pause and the seven-member review committee that followed the King’s College standoff are, in essence, an attempt to do before-the-fact listening after the fact. It is better than not doing it at all, but it costs more: more trust already spent, more positions already hardened into public commitments that are harder to walk back gracefully, more time lost that could have gone toward the actual improvement everyone claims to want. Leaders should treat listening as a precondition for a decision and an on-going process to strengthen it, not simply a repair tool for a decision already made.
Extending the self-examination this piece has asked to yourself first before you ask it of anyone resisting you is crucial. A leader who cannot say, honestly, what they personally stand to lose or gain from a decision going through is not yet in a position to fairly judge what someone else’s resistance is protecting.
Courageous leadership through change does not always only mean pushing harder against resistance. It also means having the clarity to ask what the resistance is actually protecting, and the humanity to assess that answer seriously even when it is inconvenient and uncomfortable.
About the Author Dr Basirat Razaq-Shuaib is an executive advisor to leaders and organisations on embedding courageous, inclusive and values-driven practices into strategy, policy, and operations within African leadership, education, and business contexts. She is the founder of The Winford Centre for Children and Women and The Blooming Mum, and an external expert to the African Union’s Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC), working with its Working Group on Children with Disabilities. She holds a Cambridge PhD and has recognised expertise in strategic leadership, stakeholder management, policy analysis, gender equality and social inclusion advocacy, financial reporting and risk management. She also serves on the boards of change-making social impact organisations.