As education takes backstage

These lean votes for education will translate to low GDP growth that will hinder the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Auwal Musa Rafsanjani of the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC) said.

This also means that Nigeria hadn’t yet factored education as a key to development and economic empowerment, he said.

The poor funding of the sector will likely affect pupils’ enrolment into primary schools. Minister of education Adamu Adamu recently said there are 8.6 million out-ofschool children in the country.

A 2015 UIS-UNESCO report on “Financing education in Nigeria: Opportunities for action,” said despite many years of effort, the education system in Nigeria remains weak, especially in the north, although the poor quality of statistical data hampers a clear analysis of the numbers.

Recurrent capital expenditure imbalances in budgetary allocations aggravate the challenges and stifle the provision of education infrastructure, the study said.

It said Nigeria has recorded some progress in school enrolment recently, but despite this progress, however, the country has the highest population of out of school children in the world.

“While officially mandated to oversee primary education, state governments (SGs) fail to allocate resources for this purpose, relying instead on

Analysis of the 2018 budget documents of the 29 states across the country revealed that N742.2 billion was earmarked for education.

There are no education figures for Kebbi, Adamawa, Enugu, Ebonyi, Ekiti, Ondo, and Osun.

The federal government, on the other hand, is planning to spend only N605.8 billion out of its N8.61 trillion budgets on education this year.

In 2017, the federal and 33 state governments budgeted N993 billion (7.3 percent of the budget) on education.

This figure was slightly lower than the N1.03 trillion (8.44 percent) the two tiers of government spent on education in 2016.

Of its N7.3 trillion budgets in 2017, the federal government voted N448.01 billion on the sector, compared to the N367.73 billion it spent in 2016.

Twenty-seven states budgeted N544.6 billion on the sector in 2017, a slight reduction from the N653.53 billion they spent on the sector in 2016.

This figure is far below the reported 26 percent benchmark set by UNESCO on education for developing countries.

The northern states (minus Kebbi and Adamawa) are planning to spend N365.7 billion on education this year.

This is slightly higher than the N301.2 billion the states budgeted for education in 2017.

In 2016, the region voted N361.13 billion for education.

This year, the southern states (minus Ekiti, Ondo, Osun, Enugu, and Ebonyi) budgeted

States with fat budgets

Lagos remains the biggest spender on education for