Laoye Jaiyeola is the Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) in this interview with Daily Trust, he spoke on the urgent need for the government to improve the quality of life of the citizens and human capital development to reap the benefits of the burgeoning population. He also explained the ways the private sector could help in achieving this. Excerpt.
Why is NESG involved in human capital development?
Oftentimes, people talk about Nigeria not having sufficient hard infrastructure. Emphasis is put on the need for us to get bridges, roads and other infrastructure but the real question is who are we making all these things available for? It is definitely for the people and we at the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) believe that the greatest assets that any nation can boast of are the people.
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Every time we look at Nigeria, we talk about the resilience and commitment of the Nigerian people. This is because people remain the cornerstone of our commitment. Therefore, what we need to do is to ensure that the quality of life of the people that are in Nigeria is good enough for them to live well.
That really is the reason we get involved in human capital development. If you listen to what we have been telling the government, even now as the government prepares to change over the baton, we keep on telling them some key issues they need to pay attention to and one of them is the quality of life of the people. We always look at the second chapter of the Nigerian constitution, where the government holds itself responsible for guaranteeing that the citizenry have some quality of life. It is a cornerstone of our social contract.
However, economists know that the quality and standard of people in the country is bad. Our future will be mortgaged and not worth whatever it is we are looking forward to if we do not pay adequate attention to it.
For us at the NESG, one of the things that make us amplify issues on human capital development was the report that said that by the year 2050, Nigeria will be the third most populous nation of the world. So, we started asking the question: if we will be populous, do we have the means to take advantage of that and make sure we have prepared our people to take advantage of it?
In 2021, NESG sought policies to accelerate development for the country, which led to a dialogue with the public sector. What is the result of the dialogue and the result it has yielded?
We have not done much. At the end of the summit, we further had a meeting with the World Bank and came up with a policy paper for the government with some key recommendations that need to be done. A part of that is for instance, how do we ensure that we give significant attention to our annual spending on issues of human capital development. We are talking about health, education and a lot of those things that will guarantee good quality of living for our citizens. We took these discussions not only to the federal level but extended it to the states. I want to give to commend the World Bank concerning the work they are doing about human development; what they are doing with the Governor’s Forum. They have set up significant parameters to assess how each state is doing around their human development index and I think it is based on peer comparison.
In Nigeria, because we are still dealing with the issues of out of school children, girls’ education, poor attempts at family planning, procreating children as we want, and infant mortality and given the fact that we need to take it very urgently, and given the attitude we have towards it, we are not satisfied with what the government and the private sector are doing. However, we know that regularly at the governor’s forum, between the state governments and federal government, these things are considered, but achievements are very slow. In addition to that, you will find out that there are so many policy issues.
How can the private sector help in this?
The private sector will be a major beneficiary if Nigeria has a high human development index. This is because if the workers are healthy, they will exert more effort to do the tasks given to them. This makes them happier and the country will grow to have more profit. Part of the area where the private sector can come in is ensuring we pay attention to educating our people.
What policies are you proposing to ensure the economic standard of Nigerians improves?
We are working with every stakeholder, but we are more interested in girl-child education because we believe that if you pick girls and educate them, at least, you will delay the period they will start having children, and in so doing, the quality of life will be enhanced rather than if you make them marry very early.
Another thing we are doing, courtesy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is that we are looking at out-of-school children. We are deploying behavioural economists to look at how people behave the way they do and how we get our children off the streets and back to school.
We are also doing a lot of work around poverty, looking at the very multi-faceted dimensions of poverty and how we can get involved in tackling it. But what is important is that when the policies are in place, how do we implement them? I want to say that Nigeria is not bereft of policies or ideas but our problem is the commitment to implementation and a lack of appreciation of the urgency of the problem we face. We want the government to recognise the fact that these issues are very important and need a critical and very urgent response.
You talked about some of the things affecting the education sector in the country. What are the problems and how do you intend to solve them?
One of the things we found out is a major problem in Nigeria is that we are more certificate-oriented than skills-oriented. If a company wants to employ someone, it focuses on what type of degree the candidate has rather than his skills. Therefore, people go to school only to be certified and not to acquire skills.
There is no rule that says, once you leave secondary school, you must go to university, we need to have what we call a 6-6-3-4 system that allows room for people to move into technical education, where they can build their skills and competencies but today, where we all embrace a certificate culture, people do not want to have the skills.
Part of what we are drawing the government’s attention to is that emphasis should be on skills. When people say we don’t have jobs, I ask them to go to the housing sector. People who want to build houses go to our neighbouring countries to bring people into Nigeria because we do not have trained people specifically on it.
Nigeria has gone through a lot of challenges. In the next five years, what are your fears and hopes that we can survive these issues?
I want to start with hope because if there is no hope, we won’t grow. My hope is based on the people of Nigeria. Despite the fact that we are not getting the best, the resilience and spirit of the Nigerian people is so strong that I believe that we will do a lot.
As an economist, when I look at our economy and I see how all those sectors are not doing very well, I ask myself what makes Nigeria’s economy still tick. You see the level of the informal sector and how hard they are working. The entrepreneurial spirit is so captivating that you know Nigeria can survive.
But my fear is that these same Nigerians are losing their sense of commitment to the nation, especially the young people. We should give young people a sense of belonging; there must be fairness, equity and justice. Nigerians don’t need too much to survive, but ensure there is fairness in all dealings. When those things are in place, I believe our economy will rebound. When we have a nation where there is fairness, equity and justice, it is very easy to deal with people that commit infractions. This is important so that we don’t lose our young people who we look up to to give us our dividend.
I pray that those fears will be dealt with so that the hope of Nigerians being strong people will not only take care of us but also people all over the world so that people can see their virtues and we will come to see significant diaspora remittances to Nigeria.
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