Still teaching 1948: the unfinished decolonization of Nigerian medical education

Despite growing global momentum to decolonize health professions education, Nigerian medical education remains underrepresented in mainstream decolonization scholarship.

This is a narrative, interpretive perspective informed by selected Nigerian medical education literature and the authors' professional experience, rather than a systematic, scoping, or integrative review. It examines why the visibility gap exists, what it obscures, and traces the field's evolution from its colonial curriculum origin to current reform efforts.

We argue that this limited visibility does not reflect an absence of reform, but a disconnect between locally driven educational innovations and terminology through which decolonization is recognized globally. Reforms are framed through alternative nomenclatures, such as community-based medical education, leaving them less legible. Nigerian medical education remains shaped by colonial legacies reflected in the 1948 University of London curriculum, Eurocentric biomedical dominance, Northern hegemony in knowledge production, publication inequalities, physician brain drain linked to neo-colonial dynamics of professional training, and chronic institutional underinvestment. At the same time, the Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards signal a shifting landscape in curriculum reform.

These challenges are structural and epistemological rather than merely curricular. Realizing emerging possibilities requires coordinated action from students, institutions, researchers, funders, regulators, and policy makers to move beyond symbolic diversification towards transformation that re-centers Nigerian and African perspectives in defining educational priorities. As a narrative perspective rather than a systematic evidence synthesis, the claims advanced here are best read as conceptual and hypothesis-generating and are not intended as an exhaustive account of the evidence base.