…President Buhari’s most recent comment on the Nigerian economy is not all the stuff and nonsense that the large parts of the youth commentariat have made it out to be. If anything at all, were the president drops the ball is in his failure to see how his government’s policies may have contributed to exacerbating these circumstances.
Let’s start with the facts.
First, Nigeria has a disproportionately large youth population. About four-fifth of the population are yet to celebrate their fortieth birthday.
Second, this population is growing. Low life expectancy rates mean that most Nigerians do not live long enough. On average, the Nigerian male is unlikely to celebrate his 53rd birthday, and the female her 56th. On one hand, the population is denied the opportunity to age. On the other hand, with 5.07 children born per woman, it is no surprise that the population continues to grow at around 3 percent annually.
Third, for a 15-month period that ended in March 2017, the Nigerian economy reversed much of the gains notched up by the economy since 1999. Consequently, unemployment rates have moved up significantly. And given the protection that unionised labour offers workers in employment, it is only natural that the youth, especially those newly entering the labour force are the most affected. Within this category, youth in our rural communities fare remarkably worse than the those in the cities.
Fourth, with a school life (that is the distance from primary school to the university) expectancy of 9 years for males and 8 for females, most Nigerians are barely equipped to live in the modern world. The proportion of Nigerians over 15 years old who can read and write is under 60 percent — females, of course, come out poorly on this statistic.
There is, thus, a sense in which (even if we agree that the president’s rather winding response to the closing question during his panel appearance at the Commonwealth Business Forum in London was indeed a disquisition on the congenital laziness of sections of our youth) “lazy” is simply a response to specific incentive structures.
Put these facts together, and President Buhari’s most recent comment on the Nigerian economy is not all the stuff and nonsense that the large parts of the youth commentariat have made it out to be. If anything at all, were the president drops the ball is in his failure to see how his government’s policies may have contributed to exacerbating these circumstances.
Take his subsidy programmes, and there are three of them — the central bank’s low interest rate “interventions” in support of specific sectors of the economy; the central bank’s support of the naira’s exchange rate; and the more obvious fixes by which successive governments in the country have kept the pump-station price of petrol at “affordable” rates. Despite the ruling All Peoples Congress having railed against the petrol subsidy programme while in opposition, the Buhari government continues to advertise these “interventions” as consistent with its concern for the “poor and vulnerable” segments of our society.
But the truth is, as The Economist recently argued, “Subsidies make for poor policy tools. They are snaffled by wealthy, well-connected people. They create lobbies supporting them and become hard to cut”. Arguably the more important function of our subsidy programme is the way it supports the local sense that all you have to do to be rich in this country is to be connected. Because with the right connections, once you “hammer”, you are on your way to the dream house on Banana Island, and your first Brabus-tuned Mercedes Benz.
There is, thus, a sense in which (even if we agree that the president’s rather winding response to the closing question during his panel appearance at the Commonwealth Business Forum in London was indeed a disquisition on the congenital laziness of sections of our youth) “lazy” is simply a response to specific incentive structures. From a policy maker’s vantage, the Nigerian economy is replete with such poorly thought-out, designed, and implemented incentives, including the obvious bias against consumers, which sees government preferring to levy punitive tariffs on imports. These allow domestic producers of such goods to charge a prince’s ransom as price, cutting into the disposable income of the very same segments that government reportedly purports to be interested in protecting. Does it matter that these domestic producers then enjoy import waivers to bring in these goods?
Then, there’s the problems with the education sector. We all agree that we are not spending enough as a country in this sector. But by far the bigger worry is the nature of the school curriculum. Put differently, how relevant is what our kids are being taught in school today to the needs of the economy?
Not as much as government’s failure to invest in our youth. In terms of its expenditure on health, Nigeria ranks 167 in the world (above Ghana, Gabon, and the Cook Islands to be fair, but below Benin, Papua New Guinea, Congo Democratic Republic, Fiji, etc.). Any surprise, then, that of every 100,000 live births, nearly 1,000 would-be mothers die annually? We have the fourth highest such numbers in the world — only better than Sierra Leone, Central Africa Republic, and Chad. About 70 children die for every 1,000 live births. And anecdotal evidence suggests that the ratio of physicians to the populace is shrinking faster than would an oil export-dependent economy during an oil price-induced recession. In other words, any way you look at it, these numbers will only worsen.
Then, there’s the problems with the education sector. We all agree that we are not spending enough as a country in this sector. But by far the bigger worry is the nature of the school curriculum. Put differently, how relevant is what our kids are being taught in school today to the needs of the economy? The answer to this question is, in fact, worse, when the “economy” is conceived in its dynamic state. At a point where the world is in a funk about “big data” — the new crude oil; data analytics — we are already seeing the emergence of the new “Seven Sisters”; and artificial intelligence, Nigerian schools have not gotten around to teaching coding and programming skills.
Is there any surprise, therefore, that the country’s youth might be as badly placed as President Buhari depicted them? No!
The surprise, for anyone who watched the clip on the president’s submission, was that the president ducked the opportunity to explain how his administration was tackling these and similar other problems — especially the obviously difficult matter of attracting investment into the scorched North-East of the country. In a sense, it is our loss that the president settled, instead, on the dubious expedient (in the absence of material on the latter) of launching an unflattering peroration on the circumstance of “sections” of the Nigerian youth.
Uddin Ifeanyi, journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.
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