Time flies but we could go back to see how some of our founding leaders governed Nigeria and its regions. In Nigeria’s 2024 national budget, we have about 7% allocated to education (you must include TETFund in the computation). If you average our budget on education to our GDP over three decades, Nigeria does not show up in the top 40 countries in Africa (see source here).
Countries like Congo DRC, Chad and Niger are ahead of us. They may not have big universities, but they invest a lot on vocational training. In other words, you may not hold a BSc, but there is a technical school around the corner to learn how to install tiles or do plumbing work.
Now, see on this table how Nigeria used to spend on education. I am sharing data around 1955-1962. Then the government was organized in regional format, and budgets were structured that way. Of course, the regional premiers had inputs on the budgets. (Doing a report connecting education to development from 1945 to 2023, in Nigeria. So, I have pulled data from archives; New York Times is indeed a resource.)
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You can see that education was averaging at least 15% of the national budget. Of course, there was no stealing and that 15% went into education. Today, when we say we are budgeting 7%, the budget execution may not even hit 80% which means ideally, we are spending just 5.6% assuming no leakages. If you include leakages, the budget may not be up to 3% of the budget.
Now you can see that the drop in quality is not because our kids do not have the right oil in the brain. It is simply that Nigeria has left what was working with our “security votes” which is a legal way to “steal”.
Nigerian modern leaders abandoned the pursuit of knowledge and the liberation of the mind, and whenever that happens, nations struggle.
Time flies but we could go back to see how some of our founding leaders governed Nigeria and its regions. In Nigeria’s 2024 national budget, we have about 7% allocated to education (you must include TETFund in the computation). If you average our budget on education to our GDP… pic.twitter.com/PqDtDIDnAx
— Ndubuisi Ekekwe (@ndekekwe) January 26, 2024
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It’s been long Nigeria lost her way, so it’s not surprising that she always has ready tools for all manners of criminal endeavours and chaos. We waste a lot of money on ‘security’, which is always stolen without securing anyway, because we produce animals and subhumans in large numbers here.
There’s no effort to change course, because oppression is our second nature, so anything that keeps the rest subservient and subjugated is always appealing here.
Majority of the population was badly formed, and the nation state has ended up elevating and institutionalizing bad behaviour as statecraft. It no longer matters what you pay anyone as a wage or salary here, that lure to steal and live above their means is fully entrenched.
It is no longer enough to train and equip the citizens with skills, the character formation must take precedent, because you don’t really have humans who were properly formed in good numbers here.