Friday Musings with Ayo Olukotun ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com
“While it may be easier to be polite, it’s more important to face facts so that you can make progress”
American business mogul, Bill Gates, on Cable News Network, March 27, 2018
Visitors, especially when they come from other countries, confine themselves to courtesies, unctuous remarks and bonhomie. This was expectedly more so when Nigeria’s august visitor, Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates, was brought by his Nigerian hosts, our leaders, past the proverbial corridors of power into its inner chambers, an expanded meeting of the Federal Executive Council. That gesture itself, inviting a foreigner to the nation’s highest decision-making body, is dodgy and reeks of unusual deference which will be hard to find in most other counties outside Nigeria. But let us leave that point aside for now and go on to more substantive issues.
If Aso Rock had hoped to derive public relations mileage from a possible endorsement, Gates shattered their hopes by delivering a stinging rebuke of our development and economic policies insisting that they lacked a fundamental people-friendly approach, major on projects and physical assets rather than people. As the opening quote suggests, controversy surrounded Gates’ comment which virtually took to the cleaners the Federal Government’s Economic Recovery and Growth Plan incestuously celebrated by publicists. Mark you, Gates did not say that the plan was hogwash, like a sympathetic critic, he admitted that one of the strategic objectives of the plan was human capital development, but went on to argue however, that priorities of the government teased out from implementation strategies did not prioritise human capital. Illustrating his point, Gates argued that Nigeria is one of the worst places to be born on earth considering the high rate of infant mortality, and impliedly one of the worst places to live.
Gates, please note, is no international do-gooder deriving prestige value from enlisting in humanitarian aid to the poor; he is not a Donald Trump, president of the United States, who will rather have immigrants from Norway than from African “shit-holes; nor is he one of the Chief Rabbis of Israel, Ytzhak Yosef, who in a widely lamented so-called sermon said that Africans are no better than monkeys. No; this is Bill Gates, co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who had been coming regularly to Nigeria for over a decade and had invested $2.6bn in the country. So, he was not posturing or speaking for media effect, but rather delivering home truths among friends in what may well be his adopted country. As my colleague, Abimbola Adelakun, pointed out in her column on Thursday, there is really nothing strange or momentous in what Gates had to say. (The PUNCH, Thursday, March 29, 2018). Nonetheless, his refreshing bluntness helped to set the agenda in a way in which very few others could have done. Contrary to what government publicists say, this writer has no evidence that our leaders read our newspapers. If they do, then by the principle of selective retention and selective decoding, they only see what they want to see. For example, times without count, this writer has drawn attention to the downturn in budgetary allocation in the important sectors of health and education, the twin pillars of human capital development.
As I pointed out in, “Hospitals as undertakers? Saving a dying health sector” (The PUNCH, Friday, September 27, 2017), the Buhari administration has consistently under-budgeted for the health sector, a point to which the Minister for Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole, drew attention at the meeting attended by Gates. Consider the statistics: in 2016, government allocated 3.73 per cent of total budget to health; in 2017, 4.15 per cent and in 2018 regressed to 3.9 per cent. The result of this budgetary blind spot or deliberate underfunding, is that the World Health Organisation rated Nigeria’s health care as among the worst in the world, scoring it 187th position out of 191 countries. This means that in practical terms, some war ravaged countries have better health facilities in some respects, than Nigeria. That is not all, the country has the third highest infant mortality rate on the globe while its public hospitals lack basic facilities, are full of rusty or nonfunctioning equipment and lack emergency services properly so-called. As known, even the Aso Rock Clinic, as the First Lady, Aisha Buhari, pointed out last year, has deteriorated sharply to the point that basic drugs and services are not available. So, it is not just that health services have been substandard over time, it is that they have got worse under the watch of this administration.
Consequently, no one is surprised that Nigerians who can afford it spend close to N360bn computed in foreign currency on medical tourism annually. That is also why our leaders and barons will jet out to London or New York at the slightest indication of ill health. It is not clear why a country with a heavy disease burden, constantly ravaged by epidemics, where two-thirds of its citizens lack access to safe water should choose to maintain this state of affairs.
Education is another social sector that has taken severe beating with predictable pathetic effects. Here again, our leaders pay lip service to the urgency of addressing the problem, with the Minister of Education, Mr. Adamu Adamu, recently calling for an emergency to be declared in the sector. But we do not just put our money where our mouth is. Take a look at the pattern of budgetary allocation to education under Buhari. In 2016, education got eight per cent of total budget, a strange drop from 11 per cent in 2015, the last budget prepared under former President Goodluck Jonathan. Despite the hue and cry by civil society groups, a paltry 7.4 per cent of total budget was allocated in 2017 and the figure dropped even further in 2018 to seven per cent of total budget. Is it any wonder then that the sector is lashed by repeated strikes, drop in quality, and the relentless search of Nigerian youths and their parents for overseas educational outlets? In other words, we have failed and continue to fail in providing our youths with the requisite empowerment that will make them globally competitive. There can be few other ways of dooming the future of Nigerian youths, now a demographic majority, than subjecting them to the never ending muddle in the educational sector.
It is a pity we needed Bill Gates to draw our leaders’ attention to the tragic underfunding and downgrading of critical social sectors in a season that was publicised as one of political change. The emphasis on physical infrastructure may be attributed to the desire to show off grandiose advances, as in the case of Aso Rock Clinic where new buildings have been substituted for basic services. It may also be due to the activities of a “contractocracy” with a large appetite for new contracts and the train of kickbacks.
If Nigeria is to move out of its current arrested grove and fulfil its potential as an economic tiger playing on the world stage, then it must embrace a capable and developmental state bound by a social contract with the people, who as of now magically come into reckoning only when their votes are needed to sustain or recycle non-performing elites and administrations.
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