The jobs Nigerian government(s) refused to create (I)

The other day I researched into the tiny dreams and large, byzantine tastes of Nigeria’s successive political and military class when I compared our budget with those of other countries even here in Africa. I need to clarify that I drilled down as much as I could and settled on analysing the national budgets. Each of those countries have regional/state and even local governments which have their own budgets. For instance, the cities of Johannesburg and Cape Town budgeted to spend $4billion and $3billion respectively on their combined population of just over 1.5million. In Nigeria, most states have simply usurped the functions of local governments while complaining of strangulation from the federal.

Nigerian leaders are committing a crime against humanity by bleeding the country to death and subjecting the people to poverty via their planlessness for the majority. A recent report even came out which indicates that Nigeria will become the global capital for poverty by 2018. See http://worldpoverty. io/. I think we are already. I found out that in 2012, Professor Soludo had as a minor point in an article, the fact that Nigeria’s Federal Government budgeted $180 per person. However, we have progressively spiraled down, with the government budgeting $111 per person in 2017. With the increase to N8.6trillion (or $27.5billion) in the year 2018, we have a marginal increase to $152 per Nigerian, for a whole year (compared to $1900 for each South African, $1600 for each Algerian and $1500 for each Angolan). This is what the Federal Government plans to spend on each Nigerian, be it for infrastructure, education, defense, health and what have you. Half of that money will disappear, naturally, into people’s pockets. This, in a country which fames itself to be the largest economy in Africa. We have become the largest producer of mass poverty and it’s a big shame. The day is coming when this will boil over.

But that is not my concern today. Today, we should look at the fact that Nigeria’s public sector is plagued with two major issues:

1. It is way too small and ineffectual; in fact, it is nonexistent.

2. It is corrupt and utterly fraudulent.

It looked like the government had got the memo when it warrumoured last two weeks that it would employ massively. It turned out to be a hoax. Now, it is a globally-accepted fact that Nigeria’s public sector has serious issues with corruption. Back home, we daily see this manifested, not only in the wanton and almost universal manner in which public officials like the police, FAAN, Immigrations and Customs officials collect bribes openly, and what goes on in the ministries, we see the news in the papers on a daily basis. It’s almost as if they have no other preoccupation in our civil service than to cook up large heists. Our police was recently rated as the WORST in the world. See http://wispindex.org. Of late it’s the pensions scam that’s been in the news. Our top public officers and their ‘lucky’ collaborators - dip hands into trillions of old people’s pensions. We’ve heard about these things too many times such that Nigerians have become inured and unshockable.

On a daily basis, deals are cooked up, contracts are marked up, duplicated and triplicated and paid out fraudulently to the accounts of smart Alecs. Public officials get what they don’t deserve and proceed to oppress the society. The pitiable thing about public officials is that they cannot be seen with any of their acquisitions, and so the monies they corner in the billions and trillions are sub-optimised; used to buy overpriced assets which are then not put to active use. There is a limit to the success of your investment when you cannot even identify with, monitor and supervise such openly. We have heard of those of them who inspect properties at 2am in the night because they cannot be seen doing that in broad daylight. The fact is that our big men now have many enemies, within and without, and the social media - where everyone is a journalist - is keeping a check on them. We hope they would one day realise the futility of their plundering of the commonwealth.

The anti-corruption fight hasn’t started though. When it starts, we will also hear about how we intend to address the psychology of corruption. When you pay people peanuts in the civil service for so long, when you understaff essential services and refuse to orientate workers properly, they are bound to misbehave once in a position of advantage. The big question is: When do we start to reverse this ugly scenario?

If the public service is corrupt, the politicians move in like locusts and finish off the rest. Between these two entities, Nigeria is dead.

NIGERIA’S PUBLIC SERVICE IS TOO SMALL

How can I say this? But it’s a fact. Despite the fact that Nigeria’s public service - at federal, state and local government levels - is filled with ghost workers, and it seems those who are real people there have nothing to do, still I posit that our public service is too small, and too many essential services unmanned and unprovided.

The following thoughts will cross the minds of most readers right now:

1. The private sector is the biggest employer of labour (so they tell us in business school right?).

2. Public sector jobs are outdated and inefficient.

3. A larger public sector means bigger corruption and inefficiency.

I will grant you some of the arguments above, but not all. The first one is false, at least. I have always maintained that the private sector is NOT in the business of creating jobs but in the business of MAKING PROFITS, using the least resources. I am making a push against one of those false narratives which has become widely-accepted amongst us, but which I believe is very toxic to our system. I believe very strongly that the rhetoric imported from business schools and multilateral agencies, that says countries like Nigeria should instead promote entrepreneurship among its youths, and that we should shrink the public sector, is fraudulent, or in the least, premature. The evidence I got doing this small research points to the exact opposite. But our politicians have now successfully used this false narrative as crutches to escape responsibility while creaming off the commonwealth. We need to fight back.

Check this table below. I extracted this from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) statistics. It shows that whereas the developed countries have large public sectors - with some of them employing 2 or 3 out of every 10 people of working age - failing, failed and poor countries, employ only between 2 or 6 out of every 100 people of working age:

Figure 1 - Only tech-based far eastern countries employ as few in the public sector as most African countries.

The FACT is that we in developing, failing and failed countries never had any solid public sector base to provide sanity and allow our private sector to build on. Therefore, we build in vain today.