Politics and the irrational consensus 

This weekend, I was at the book presentation and 80th Anniversary Celebration of my senior brother and great educationist, Professor Adamu Baikie. The guest speaker who addressed the crisis facing our educational sector was Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Governor of the Central Bank. He said two things that inspire my column today.

Our Federal Universities are comatose due to under funding by the Federal Government and continuous strikes by university unions he argued. This crisis has been ongoing for thirty years. Meanwhile, the Nigerian elite have sent their children abroad for education in the United Kingdom, United States, Malaysia, South Africa and even Ghana. In Ghana alone, we have 71,000 Nigerian students paying 155 billion naira to the Ghanaian economy for this privilege. The total budget for all of Nigeria’s federal universities is 121 billion naira, less than what Nigerian parents pay in Ghana alone. Meanwhile, we make no rational efforts to mobilise sufficient resources from the public purse and parents to create the basis for making our universities functional citadels of teaching, research and learning.

The second point that struck me from Sanusi’s lecture was his question on whether we need 36 states in a context in which many of these states have became insolvent organisations with the Federal Government placing over 70% of its budget on overheads and state governments spending up to 96% of their public expenditure on salaries and the upkeep of the political class. In a recent lecture “Perspectives on the Cost of Governance”, my good friend Nasir El Rufai explained that it “costs nearly

2.5 million naira on the average annually for the upkeep of each of the federal government’s nearly one million public sec­ tor workers – in the police, civil service, military and para-military services and teachers in government schools and insti­tutions in all, the 49-line Ministries, Departments and Agencies mentioned in the 2011 Appropriations Act will each cost an average of N49.49 billion to run.”

He adds that the 469 members of the federal legislature and their support staff at the National Assembly will spend N150 billion this year and the cost of maintaining every legislator every year will be N320 million per legislator per annum. It is therefore not surprising to hear the news from the Senate last week that 32 of our 36 states in the country are in financial distress. And yet, we learn at the same time that Plateau state is investing 4 billion Naira to build another government house to provide more comfort for the Governor while the Rivers State Government is investing $30 million, nearly 5 Billion Naira in a helicopter that can allow the governor to travel without delays

We are reminded this same week by Bolaji Abdullahi, the Youth Minister that that this is a country in which 67 million young people, 42% of the population is unemployed. And yet, our governments at the Federal, State and Local Government levels spend over 70% of public expenditure to service politicians and public sector workers who constitute 4% of the population while there are no resources to provide services for the other 96% of the population.

Politics of course has no rationality as each week, delegations after delegations; visit the National Assembly to lobby for the creation of more states, a clear invitation to national suicide. We must join Sanusi in demanding a paradigm shift in this country, we must reduce the number of administrative units we have so that money can be liberated for development.

In 1960 when Nigeria became independent, the Federal Civil Service employed only 330 senior officials but by 1972, we had 650,000 public servants out of which 100,000 occupied senior positions. In 1975, the number of civil servants passed the bar of one million and the figure does not include members of the armed forces. It was the oil boom of the 1970s therefore that pushed the country towards the mad race of creation of states and local governments to create jobs.

The former Head of State, General Ibrahim BABANGIDA, in a speech delivered to “Oxford and Cambridge

Club” formulated the issues clearly: “The worst features in the attitude of the Nigerian elite over the past three decades or more have included: fractionalism, disruptive competition, extreme greed and selfishness, indolence and the abandonment of the pursuit of excellence… how many new universities or institutions have been created essentially when all window dressing is removed, only because of bad or selfish advice of some persons seeking new‘empires’ over which to preside?… How many new ministries and departments have been created to satisfy personal ambitions? What is at the bottom of the demands for family sized Local Government Councils? How many false projects have been started to create contracts for importunate canvassers? (Daily Times 18/3/1989)

It is the height of cynicism that Babangida went ahead to create more and more “empires” for his elite friends to find their niche in the Nigerian State.

The result, as El Rufai reminds us is that our entire oil earnings for this year cannot pay the salaries and allowances of politicians and public sector workers and their ‘overheads’ – their tea, coffee, travel and estacode. Almost the entire amount of the capital budget for this year is scheduled to be borrowed. If we are unable to spend money on roads, health, education and job creation, we are headed for the doldrums.

Today, 31st October will witness seminars and reflections by the United Nations and population and governance experts as the world hits the 7 billion population mark. In Nigeria, the National Population Commission tells us that our population growth rate remains high at 3.2%. The result is that the 144 million Nigerians we counted in 2006 have grown to 167.9 mil­ lion this year. In 2020, our population will reach 221 million. We cannot continue to spend all the nation’s resources on 4%ofthe population and expect peace or development. The time for enlightened self-interest to guide irrational politicians has arrived