Nigerians applaud whenever the Federal Government makes a promise to put up a presence in their locality. Often, such promises don’t mean anything more than establishing a tertiary institution or construct office blocks for an agency of the government. In regard to a tertiary institution, funds are pumped in to get them established and, thereafter, the FG doesn’t have enough funds to pump into them. In the event, these institutions underperform. As this perennial challenge continues, many lawmakers struggle to bring government-funded tertiary institutions into their community. Nothing is bad in that. But we are getting to the point where we need to decide what will actually benefit us over what will earn applause and then quickly degenerate into recrimination over funding, as the situation between FG and workers in tertiary institutions shows at the moment.
Not long ago, Senator Uba Sani from Kaduna Central got a bill passed to establish a Federal Government College of Education in his senatorial constituency. I congratulate him. But there’s a challenge to this approach that many other lawmakers in the National Assembly also adopt. A close look shows that a handful of locals may eventually get jobs. Beyond that, however, what we have is the tradition of the FG pumping funds into many of its establishments that don’t, at the rate we actually need, improve the nation’s productivity base or even the well-being of the people in the locality where they are established. Meanwhile, with the rate at which our population grows, and the hardship that most people face, there are better approaches that can do the locals good, and contribute on a larger scale to their well-being. Why do I zero in on Senator Sani with respect to this national challenge? One, only a handful of people in our public space understand the value when one raises matters of urgent national importance. I believe Sani belongs in this category.
My assessment of Sani (and I had sat to discuss with him in his Abuja Office when he served as an aide to former President Olusegun Obasanjo) is that he’s a man who understands a useful argument when he hears one, and he can discern an issue clearly as any intelligent person should. My further close-up observation of him in the years that followed made me think he was an introspective person, sober, intelligent and tactful. In that sense, he’ll get my drift, and this is why I place him at the centre of this vital national discourse.
Now, most people read basic issues that some of us raise about the state of the nation from personal and very narrow perspective, and in the process the entire point being made is missed. The public officials concerned or their followers would simply take the point raised badly, and start a round of swearing that makes one wonder about the state of the mind of some people. There was this time I pointed out an issue with regard to railway and the “benefits” that weren’t data-driven which the Transportation Minister, Rotimi Amaechi, said there were in the China loans taken to construct railways in Nigeria. One of his followers who identified himself as Churchhill Okechukwu O. had the following to say as his response on June 19, 2020: “Your massive sculptured Head is the reason for this Individually deluded write up… Actually, it’s not your fault. People who find time to draw this line of rhetorical deluge never think of anything worthwhile to do with their miserable life, let alone to dream of anything meaningful for society. My humble advice is that you visit Rivers State once in your life time and see for yourself the legacies of AMAECHI afterwards remain ever silent. Mongrel.”
I had actually laughed when I read this comment and forgot about it. Much later I was to see that another reader who identified himself as BigBlindCountry had responded to Churchhill Okechukwu O. thus: “Your unwarranted emotional rant betrays your lack of intellectual response to a matured dialogue. If you can take a moment to dislodge your cemented lips from Amaechi’s rear end, you might appreciate logical reasoning.” The reader who read my piece of the stated date would have noticed the gap between the swearing that Churchhill Okechukwu O. engaged in and the issues I raised about how government officials promote projects that aren’t firmly placed under a verifiable overarching data-driven policy or plan. But these are the kinds of minds we have around. I quoted Churchhill Okechukwu O. so that readers could see the strange response of some Nigerians to important national issues.
Now I return to the bill to set up a federal institution in Sani’s constituency. He has done a good thing. The issue, however, is that this approach which many lawmakers adopt can hardly solve some of the issues we have in regard to education, rather they compound them. The approach gives more responsibilities to the FG in a situation where trending national disposition is that the FG should be divested of some roles and funds. Meanwhile, Sani’s effort in securing a tertiary institution for Giwa LGA drew the usual applause that it would have drawn in any Nigerian community where we generally regard such things as gift, rather than the duty of the government. Lawmakers as well as their leadership shower encomiums on Sani; all well-deserved, assuming our circumstances today doesn’t include FG that bites more than it can chew.
Prominent among those who praise Sani is the Senate President. What he and many other people leave out are the implications in a situation where we have a recurrent expenditure which the FG either borrows or uses CBN’s financial instruments to finance. We have a deficit on the finance of overhead cost, yet we keep adding to the burden rather than search for another way of providing the needed tertiary education for our people. The Bill was noted to have been passed after consideration “of the report of the Senate Committee on Tertiary Institutions and TETFUND.” The reference to TETFUND brings to mind the general mentality that that this FG-owned body would provide funds for any tertiary institution from what it generates. But TEFUND collects funds from companies and other organizations that power the economy; then it distributes such to educational institutions mostly in the form of sponsorship of projects. TETFUND has been doing this for years, but has its interventions stopped both academic and non-academic staffs of educational institutions from embarking on strike over their unmet financial demands from the FG? In fact, the more funds the FG says it pumps into these institutions the more the institutions complain of inadequate funding.
There’s no doubt that governments cannot continue to add to the weight they carry, especially where we aren’t strongly expanding the base in the private sector from where it generates revenue. But we don’t give thoughts to this thing. We equally lack the will to call for a change in approach. We may not want tertiary institutions to be basically in the hands of the private sector for obvious reasons. But when we do a breakdown, it would be obvious that we can achieve more if governments leave tertiary education largely to the private sector while it provides supports to them, just as it does to private primary health care facilities. Here, government provides funds to improve these primary health care facilities based on set criteria. Citizens have been the beneficiaries.
A mathematics of funding of tertiary institutions would show that just one year of FG’s spending on overhead cost of 100 government-owned tertiary institutions in Nigeria is enough to make four times that number provide quality education, if the same funds were given out in the form of assistance to privately-owned tertiary institutions. This thus takes care of the challenge of larger student population but lack of enough institutions to take them. It also takes care of the current situation where we expend so much on overhead in government-owned tertiary institutions and we still get outcomes that are short of what is considered international standard. I think encouraging private investment in tertiary institutions while governments assist them is an approach politicians like Sani should consider and implement when they have the opportunity?
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