Adi: Buhari Must Invest Heavily in Education to Spur Growth
A Senior Lecturer in Development Economics at the Lagos Business School, Pan Atlantic University, Dr. Bongo Adi spoke to Obinna Chima on expectations from the incoming administration. Excerpts:
The president-elect, Major General Muhammadu Buhari would be inaugurated in the next few days, considering where we are as a nation, what areas would you advise his government to focus on?
People have been talking about change and we have heard so much as about change. Yes, I agree that there is need for change in attitude, there is need for change in the way we do things and the way we react to things. I agree completely that we need change in these areas as Nigerians. But, in terms of other areas- our environment and our economy, do we need change? What I think we need is continuity. The outgoing president Jonathan’s government has achieved critical milestones in certain key areas in infrastructure. Of course, heavily criticised in the electioneering campaign. President Jonathan came up with a concrete development plan as well as a concrete industrial development master plan. Rather than change, I think the incoming government need to take those documents, review them properly and continue on that trajectory. This is because for me, I am not looking at physical accomplishments. I think the major achievement of the Jonathan’s administration is the realisation that there is need for a concrete vision and a concrete plan of action. Of course, you might ask me that we have had several of such plans in the past. People ask me what happened to the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS), but then, we have a plan of action that is time-based and also resource-determined. That, to me is a more focused way of planning in an economy such as ours. So, the incoming administration should ensure that it picks up from where President Jonathan is going to stop.
Beside the advice that the incoming government should continue the policies of the present government, are there additional agenda you want them to pursue to move the economy forward?
The focus in recent time for every economy that wants to grow is competitiveness. What is the basic determinant of competitiveness, it is nothing other than the skills and competences of people and citizens. In order to improve your competitiveness, you need to invest heavily on education. If people are well educated, they can add value to others or add value to themselves. The problem in Nigeria today is that we have a huge-mismatch between what people claim to know and what they are able to do. That is one problem. The second problem is that we lack the adequate skills to transform our economic system. From one discipline to the other and from one department to another, you will notice this huge gap in education and we need to bridge that gap by investing in quality education from the primary, secondary and tertiary levels. We have to invest in research and development. Now, this is not about singing the mantra of research and development over the years. If you break down research and development, what you get is education. People need to have advance skills and you can’t get advanced skills if you haven’t developed certain fundamental skills. So, competitiveness is all about improving the skills of the people. Another area is the diversification of the economy. In diversification, we keep talking about the production of more agricultural products. There is nothing wrong with that, because we can increase the volume of primary produce that we normally supply to the international market. But with that, we are still suppliers of primary commodities and we have not graduated that level of production. We can only say we are beginning to aim at competitiveness when we begin to diversify our economy away from primary produce. That means that we need to invest in advanced skills and resources in other to enhance the value of those primary commodities, which would attract better terms in the international market. Until you have done that, I am not sure it is valid to keep talking about diversification.
President Jonathan’s administration is generally perceived to have ran a bloated governance system and a lot of Nigerians are now advising the incoming Buhari’s administration to cut the cost governance and today, the unemployment rate in the country is very high. How can the incoming administration achieve that?
It is a dilemma. Lean government versus a bloated government. It is very easy to say a government should run a lean government. But, who are the people employed by government? The citizens of the country and government is the biggest and largest employer of labour in Nigeria. So, telling the government to sack workers and put them on the streets, will not only destroy the system, but would have very dire implication for the private sector. This is because there is an integral between the private and the public sector. Most states in Nigeria depend solely on federal allocations to pay salaries. Let’s say those states decides to disengage those workers, the disengaged workers are those that used to earn salaries and are able to buy whatever the private sector brings to the market. Now, when they are disengaged and they are not able to earn wages, therefore their spending power is whittled down, what happens to the system? It also affects those in the private sector. So I don’t think that is a sane argument in an economic structure such as ours. To run a lean government? People would say those to be disengaged would find something else to do to make money, but I don’t think that is the way to go.
There is a controversial issue of the fuel subsidy. Some have argued that it is one