VICTOR OGIEMWONYI
Victor Ogiemwonyi, a retired investment banker, is a former Governing Council member of the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), now Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX Group). He sent this contribution from Ikoyi, Lagos. He can be reached via comment@businessamlive.com and marketconversations.substack.com
In the first two pillars examined in the series “Government should do what the private sector can not do” – what governments must compulsorily do, I looked at healthcare and concluded that governments must take the lead, and must make it available and affordable.
In the follow-up to the above, I also examined security, as the next most important pillar governments must prioritise and compulsorily focus on, because only a secure environment can give peace of mind and overall welfare to the populace. I advocated that the government needs to restructure and decentralise the entire security system in Nigeria, and internal security must take on a layered approach.
Now. to the conclusion.
The education and the judiciary pillars
Education and the judiciary systems are the other two pillars that governments must ensure are in place and working well.
Some might argue that education can be provided by the private sector efficiently and effectively. Yes. Government supervision is still required, and the government’s commitment and responsibility for educating its people is fundamental. This is because education is a public good that cuts across everything else.
Education as development
Education represents the most important aspect of development, with multiplier effects in every area of human development. Governments’ focus on education must be holistic and viewed from the broadest perspective as possible. This means educating people to think, and to broaden minds to help themselves. Education in this view means every type of education that includes basic, technical, vocational and tertiary education that must give skills to people.
Government ensures access to basic education for all its people is the minimum. Basic education must be a right of every child, and must be compulsory for all children up to year 12. Every effort must be made to get people to further their education at every level they want. An educated populace is easy to govern. Once they can be educationally empowered, you have provided a way out of poverty.
That is why education is the most effective poverty alleviation mechanism any government can provide its people. Financing education is not as expensive as people think, because illiteracy is far more expensive.
Getting the right skills
After basic education that teaches people to think, the next level of education is skills development. This is essential for making people productive. An educated mind can quickly absorb skills. Skills keep people employed, whether in self-employment or working in an establishment.
Today, acquiring skills has become the biggest challenge. We have many educated people who lack skills. This is because our educational system, of late, has made little room for skills acquisition. We need to change this; luckily we can do this rapidly, because of the plentiful youth population, who are educated enough to quickly acquire skills that can be provided through short targeted courses. With this, we can easily put a large number of our youths through quick skills acquisition, short training courses of 18/24 months and it will make a huge difference.
Increasing our teacher manpower, for instance, will create opportunities for the numerous graduates who are currently unemployed to register for National Certificates of Education, NCE, and become teachers in our primary, secondary and vocational schools. Nursing is already one of the quick wins in this area, because of the prospects they have for employment locally and abroad, which is enormous. There are many viable areas that can be accelerated. We need to make it a national priority to hasten this part of our education, to create jobs, and prepare for our coming economic revolution.
My first job as a graduate was working with the Industrial Training Fund (ITF). It is one of the best ideas that is yet to fully realise its potential. The ITF scheme was started in 1973 and was well structured to encourage employers to keep training their staff for skills and make claims from the funds pooled from all registered companies, who compulsorily contribute one percent of their payroll to the Fund. They get refunded, when they show evidence of the training in the previous year. It was a win-win idea for industry and country. These are the types of programmes that must be initiated and accelerated.
Technical and vocational schools should be free for students and entrepreneurs that want to establish these institutions, and should be encouraged and incentivised with grants against results of their products.
Financing students education
The benefits of the Student Loan Programme
The recently commenced government students’ loan programme in the country, which provides loans to university students for their tuition, with an allowance for upkeep, is one of the most consequential achievements of the current administration. Its impact will be massive when fully operational. The thinking and the competent people put in place, to run it, is credit to our educational development. This will provide access to higher education that has been absent for a while.
A retrospective view of Nigeria of the 60s and 70s, highlights the difference education made in the lives of those who got free education at the basic and secondary levels, and in some cases, government loans and scholarships for university education in those years. The progress we see today in those areas, where education was free, particularly in the Southwest, clearly shows that the cost of free education was no cost, at all, when compared to the benefits.
The benefits represent a large population of educated people with employment, many self-employed and free from poverty.
Needed reforms in our education today
Education in Nigeria requires reforms in many areas; only a few can be reviewed here.
Budgets for education need to seriously go up, and must be just as big as healthcare budgets. It must provide access for all children.
It must provide for teachers at all levels, and make the teaching profession attractive again; and let those who teach find satisfaction in what they do. Teachers are not asking to be paid like bankers; they teach because they love what they do. All they want is a little above average remuneration that gives them the satisfaction that they are appreciated. It will inspire them to give their best.
As has been done in the past, with university teachers getting accommodation within their universities and being enabled with grants and freedom to research and teach, this can be done differently today, even when providing such accommodation may be outdated in the current environment, this can be done by augmenting with a proper yearly grant of housing allowance that does not form part of their normal remuneration. They can also be given car loans that are easily repayable from their monthly pay.
The inadequacies in basic remuneration for this very important group of people, tasked with the nurturing of our children, has resulted in having many in our teaching professions, those who really don’t want to teach but only looking for a source of income. They subsidise by selling diesel, selling handout notes, and other non-academic endeavours, which take their minds away from doing their best for our children.
We need only people who want to be teachers. The recent requirement that anyone who wants to teach in our universities must possess a PhD, and must be ready to be published, is one of the best things that has driven out the casual teachers in our universities.
The prescriptions here for university teachers to be provided with housing grants and vehicle loans, can also be given to all other teachers.
Our commitment for education must be total.
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