In 1983, there were no overhead bridges in China.
That’s what Jacob Woods, Chairman China Nigeria Business council said. According to him, he came to Nigeria in 1983 and that “availed him the opportunity to see a bridge for the first time as there no bridges in China”. Today over Chinas longest river, the Yangtze , China has 73 bridges alone, we still have one bridge over the River Niger.
Why?
in 1960, the GDP per Capital of China was $121, Nigeria GDP per capital was $559, this means Nigerians were richer than the Chinese. As at 2014, the GDP per capital of the Chinese was $3,865, Nigeria was $1,091…..in summary they have overtaken us.
What happened?
No its not corruption….China 2014 Transparency Corruption Index score is 36, Nigeria is 27…not much daylight there.
No, Its not military rule, China is also not “free” and democratic……
No, they don’t have a better government in In fact between 20m to 65m Chinese are estimated to have died from starvation between 1958 and 1961, due to a famine caused by failed policies of the communist party…
So what happened?
Many things happened, why did China, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia etc all the Asian tigers who seem to be at par with us in the 1960, leave us in the dust literally?
I have tried to look for the answer, and I feel I have the culprit. But first, let me make my case….
First, this quote “No nation can develop beyond the quality of its education, as a nation’s overall advancement is a direct function of the quality of the educational attainment of its citizens” (Ololube, Egbezor, Kpolovie and Amaele, 2012).
Do you agree with the statement above?
Of course, Poor quality primary education produces poor quality secondary students, which in turn produce poor candidates for our rundown universities; who feed poor graduates to the marketplace.
Allow me drive that point home….
- Baldwin and Borreli (2008) in a study revealed that the growth of per capita income is positively associated with higher education. Ie the more you spend on higher education the more your Growth per Capital rises….
- Barro found primary and secondary education to have positive and significant impact on the growth rate of GDP per capita.
- Musai et al. (2011) studied the relationship between education and economic growth of 79 countries. They revealed that Increases in education spending, physical capital and labour force will increase the economic growth.
So I believe the point is made, you spend on education, you get educated graduates who then drive the economy…so next step, lets consider what Nigeria has spent on education.
Ø From 1960 to 1990, only once did Nigeria allocate more than 10% of any budget to education. 30 years!
Ø In Nigeria, average public education expenditure to total government expenditure between 1970 and 2010 is 5.72%. Nigeria’s annual budgetary allocations to education are significantly lower than the UNESCO recommended minimum (26%) for developing countries.
Ø Nigeria’s percentage of the total annual budgetary allocations to education is significantly lower than 20 World Bank sampled countries. Nigeria is actually the worst of the all. I list, Botswana, 19.0%; Swaziland, 24.6%; Lesotho, 17.0%; South Africa, 25.8%; Cote d’Ivoire, 30.0%; Burkina Faso, 16.8%; Ghana, 31%; Kenya, 23.0%; Uganda, 27.0%; Tunisia, 17.0%; and Morocco, 17.7% while that of Nigeria on the average is less than 6 % and in 2013 is 8.7%
Ø Dr Obi former Minister of Education in an interview in 2013 gave the below statistics on share of GDP to nations education budget during her time….”South Africa 7.9%, Ghana 4.4%, Angola 4.4%, Nigeria 0.79%.”.
Ø Lets zoom in on this…For 4 years, 1970 to 1973, during the oil boom years, Nigeria did not allocate up to 1% of the federal budget to education. Note this was our Head of State was saying “Nigeria problem was how to spend her money”.
Ø
So its clear, we have not invested in education, and thus we did not produced quality graduates that lifted the nation. Our Universities in Nigeria did not make the list of the best 2000 universities in the world at all. Nigerian Universities were not even found in the best 6000 universities in the world.
Ok so we have established that education spending drives economic growth, we have also established we have not spent on education…what about China?
China invested in education. From 1968, China has steadily increased her share of the education budget from 1.2 % in 1968 to nearly 4% today…note their GDP increased considerably. 4% of the Chinese budget in 2010 is $235b…..or N47trillion.
The Journal of Business Management and Economics Vol. 5(5).August, 2014 found that there is an increase in the economic growth in China when education expenditure increases. It can be observed that a 1% increase in education expenditure will lead to 0.8915% increase in GDP per capita for China.
China did a lot of market and agricultural reforms, but those reforms were carried out by a well-educated Chinese labour force. ditto all the Asian tigers….so the story is clear, as we got rich, we stopped spending on education, meanwhile Chinese came out of a famine that killed millions and increased spending on education.
Thus key point; As we reduced our education spend, China and the Asian tigers increased theirs.
Yes I can hear many of you blaming the government for not spending on education, but this is a Nigeria ailment, the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics has a poverty report dated 2012. using the constant price of 2003/2004, it tracked changes in expenditure of households…yes you and I.
In that report education spend fell from 5.21 to 1.40…that was the sharpest fall. In essence as things got ‘tight” you and I spent less on education. We probably moved the kids to cheaper schools, took the girls out of school, bought less books etc but the point is clear, the government and the private individuals in Nigeria have viewed education as a expense that can be cut…..compare to a nation like South Korea where some parents spend close to 25% of their incomes on education
Folks this is not rocket science.
My post Is not about how to spend the education budget or how to reform education, we will take time and write a paper on that as well. I sought out to show that a correlation exists between education spending and economic growth. money cannot solve all problem in education but, money can solve infrastructure issues, I mean these are universities in major cities like Lagos, Abuja without water…I mean…water.
So What to do? for this post there is only one main recommendation, get serious with education by increase the education budget……
- Keep it simple, tie Education budget to the GDP…China has a 4% of GDP education spending Target, Indonesia has a constitutional provision that 20% of any budget MUST be spent on education ……
- Simply make ECA an account to fund ONLY education and healthcare…turn it to the ECAEH, Excess Crude Account for Education and Health…give the money as matching grants to states and local governments to fund their health and education budgets
- start a catch up provision to raise the budget allocation every year until we reach the UNESCO standard of 26%. “i read through the APC manifesto, the governing APC is projecting to spend 15% on education, ie public education, need to raise the target.
- tie FAAC disbursements to education spend. It was President Shehu Shagari that once recommended that primary school enrollment numbers be included in FAAC sharing formula. It didn’t pass. We should revisit this. Education should be a factor in sharing FAAC, it’s a much better measure than say :”Minimum responsibility of states”…whatever that means
we will examine education again. This post has a simple message, get serious with funding education. if we don’t fix education, we cant fix poverty or Boko Haram….
Its our problem, we can fix it
(Photo credit EMerging Equity)
