Continued from LAST WEEK
With regards to the country’s external debt, Nigeria’s debt stock when Obasanjo left office was $3bn. This rose to $10bn during Yar’Adua’s tenure and further stood at $15bn when Jonathan left. Nigeria’s current external debt profile is put at about $41bn and still counting! What is more intriguing is that Nigeria now borrows to service its external debt. So tragic. The report of the FDC under reference, noted that in terms of what would be left of Nigeria’s external reserves when the external debt is subtracted, the balance under Obasanjo’s tenure stood at $40bn; $22.34bn during Yar’Adua and $13.57bn during Jonathan’s tenure. The balance during the current regime, is an abysmal -$0.82bn. This poor economic performance has led to the country’s economy slipping into recession in two quick successions in the past seven years. Another dark side to the country’s economic crises is that Nigeria, which is the sixth largest oil producer in the world, sadly exports refined petroleum products and subsidizes fuel importation to the tune of a monthly N500 billion. In fact, a report by the Vanguard (2022), noted that N4.194 trillion was paid as subsidy to oil marketers between January 2017 and June 2022.
This is even as all the four refineries in the country have remained grounded and the workers have been drawing salaries for doing nothing. From the foregoing negative economic indices, we do not need any clairvoyant to tell us that Nigerians are in for harder days ahead. In fact, the World Bank’s 2022 Nigeria Poverty Assessment report has projected the number of poor Nigerians to hit 95.1 million by the end of this year. Human Capital Development (HCD) Human capital and human capital development are two sides of the same coin. While human capital refers to the skills, experiences, knowledge and education that labour contributes to the economy, human capital development is the process of acquiring and increasing the number of people who have the skills, education and experience which are critical for the economic and political development of a country (Goetz and Hu, 1996). In other words, human capital development is the process of further developing the productive capacity of human beings through investments in education and other critical areas (Garavan, Morley, Gunningle and Collins, 2001). Human Capital Development in Nigeria An overview of Nigeria’s HCD indices in terms of performance and ranking done by leading global organizations such as the Institute for Health Metrical and Evaluation (IHME) (2016), the United Nations Human Capital Development Index (UNHCDI), (2017) and the World Bank Human Capital Index (WBHCI), (2018) shows that: Nigeria ranked 171 among 195 countries studied by the IHME in terms of Expected Human Capital Index in 2016.
The 2017 figures published by the UNHCDI, however, showed that Nigeria climbed to the 157th position among 189 countries surveyed within the period under review. In the 2018 figures put together by the WBHCI, Nigeria became the 152nd out of 157 countries in terms of performance in HCD. The HCD Index was done using three dimensions of Human Capital Development of health (life expectancy at birth), education (mean years of schooling for adults and expected years of schooling for children of school entering age) and standard of living (gross national income per capita) (National Economic Council: Human Capital Development Core Working Group, 2020). The above figures explain the slow economic growth, progress and prosperity of Nigeria, as the differences in the level of socio-economic development across nations are attributed not so much to the size of natural endowments or their physical capital but to the quality and indeed, quantity of human capital or resources. Perhaps, aware of this negative ranking on HCD, Nigeria has since 2020, emplaced a Human Capital Development Core Working Group (HCDCWG) aimed at networking with other stakeholders to deliberately stimulate and accelerate human capital development in the XT WEEK country. This strategy targeted three (3) priority areas of HCD to include: i) Health care – To improve availability, accessibility, affordability and quality of health services; ii) Education – To ensure quality universal education for Nigeria’s children and youth, especially girls; iii) Labour Force Participation – To particularly double youth participation in labour force from 23% to 46% and to double female/women empowerment or inclusiveness from 21% to 41% by 2030 (Eugenia George-Genyi, 2022 p.12).
In this segment of the presentation, our focus is on education, which is one of the priority areas adopted by Nigeria to scale up its human capital development efforts. It is imperative to start by acknowledging that education is a vehicle for the liberation of the poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalised. Education facilitates the acquisition of knowledge, life skills, technical skills, and problem-solving skills for the development of society. It is the wheel on which value addition and technological breakthroughs revolve. Education is also needed to hold leadership to account for its stewardship. It is against this critical background that education is always expected to be a priority in public sector budgets in consideration of the plan, policy, and budget continuum. Education plans and policies show the pathways, the agreed societal goals, and direction for the improvement of education, while the budget provides the resources to drive the achievement of the overall goals of plans and policies (Onyekpere, 2022). Sadly, budgetary allocations to education by successive Nigerian governments have fallen far short of global expectations. Although the UNESCO recommended that developing nations should give up a minimum of 26% of their annual budget to public education, Nigeria’s allocation to that sector has been abysmally low. In fact, Nigeria’s budgetary allocation to education is still less than 10 percent. Consequently, of the N70.6 trillion budgeted by the federal government in the last seven years, only N4.42 trillion or a miserly 3.12 percent was allocated to the education sector. Unlike Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa have done far better by allocating a maximum of 23 and 16.7 percent, respectively to their education sector (The Guardian, 2021).
The consequences of the perennially declining budgetary allocations and slipshod attention to education on Nigeria’s human capital development are multifaceted and enormous. These range from persistent strike, brain drain, and the phenomenon of out-of-school children to stunted economic growth. Studies have shown that teachers at all levels of the nation’s educational system – from primary, secondary, and tertiary – are not properly motivated to effectively perform their duties. Consequently, the teachers are often on strike to compel the government to properly fund education as well as meet their welfare needs. It is common knowledge that lecturers in public universities in Nigeria under the aegis of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) have been on strike for over seven months now. The strike revolves largely around the issue of poor funding of public universities which the government hinges on paucity of resources. The teachers’ frequent industrial actions have more often than not, disrupted the regular academic calendars of schools (NBS, 2009). What is more, experienced and high-quality teachers who are disgusted with the system, migrate in droves to other neighbouring countries with better working conditions (Judge, Thoresen, Bono, & Patton, 2001), thus contributing to brain drain. The major fallout of that is the dwindling standard of education in Nigeria.
A related consequence of the poor funding of education, leading to strikes and the resultant disruption to academic calendars, is the phenomenon of out-of-school children. As the 2022/2023 academic year commences, the UNESCO has put the current number of out-ofschool children and youths in Nigeria at 20 million. The figure which is the highest in the world also indicates that Nigeria produces one among every five outof-school children globally. The security implications of letting such huge population of young idle hands loose on the nation is very telling in deed. The north eastern and north western parts of the country house the highest percentage of such young kids, once described by Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, as standby generators of violence. Media reports indicate that bandits, kidnappers, insurgents and other terrorist elements, randomly recruit scores of such impressionable minds into their army of destruction, thereby further compounding the seemingly intractable level of insecurity in the northern region of Nigeria and elsewhere.
Continues NEXT WEEK
