Postcolonial Perspectives on Lifelong Learning Policy in Nigeria: Continuity, Rupture, and African Alternatives

This study developed a postcolonial critique of lifelong learning policy frameworks in Nigeria, tracing continuities between colonial education epistemologies and contemporary lifelong learning policy architectures while identifying and theorising African alternative frameworks. Nigerian adult education policy has been extensively shaped by internationally circulating lifelong learning frameworks originating from UNESCO and the European Union, yet the extent to which these frameworks reproduce colonial epistemological assumptions about knowledge, development, and the educated African subject has not been subjected to sustained scholarly critique within the Nigerian context. The study employed a critical theoretical methodology combining postcolonial textual analysis of international and national lifelong learning policy documents, historical genealogical analysis of Nigerian adult education policy from the colonial period to the present, and philosophical interviews with 28 adult education scholars and policy intellectuals across six geopolitical zones. Findings demonstrated persistent colonial epistemological residues within contemporary Nigerian lifelong learning policy, particularly in the construction of African adult learners as deficient subjects requiring remediation by externally validated knowledge, the subordination of indigenous knowledge forms in curriculum frameworks, and the privileging of economic human capital purposes over social and cultural dimensions of adult learning. The study develops an original Afrocentric Lifelong Learning Framework drawing on Ubuntu philosophy, Nigerian indigenous educational traditions, and postcolonial developmental thought. This framework offers a theoretically grounded alternative foundation for reimagining Nigerian adult education policy. Keywords: postcolonial theory, lifelong learning policy, Nigeria, Afrocentric framework, indigenous education.