Come with me, dear readers, as we show our right-leaning, market-driven, capitalist-oriented governments which jobs they refused to create.
My takes are that;
1. Private sector enterprise is great and is the future, BUT only after you have developed a solid base in public service.
2. The effective and adequate manning of public services is not only absolutely essential to the development of the private sector, but indeed the very survival of societies. How can you get tourists or sustainable investors when your country is unsafe, unclean and unorganized? Our public schools still have a ratio of about 1 teacher to 200 children. Ditto our hospitals and even our policing. There is too much space for new employment if our leaders had sincerity and vision.
3. I wrote as much in two of my books even though it did not strike me as vividly then, that there were millions of job opportunities in the public sector, if we just put our economy side by side some of the other economies that work and check their manning levels in public services. I had pointed to the ENVIRONMENTAL sector in my last book ‘Change is Going to Come’, while in ‘Things to Do Before Your Career Disappears’, I spent time ruminating about where our large working population would be engaged in the age of Artificial Intelligence where almost every career is now in jeopardy. I believe the key is simply in the public sector at large.
4. We have been passing our youth through very harrowing times by closing this door against them and asking them to ‘go and start something’, ‘go and be on your own’. Many have tried, only to find that there is no support, and no clients.
5. The Adamu Fika report in 2010, concluded that Nigeria was spending way too much on 18,000 top politicians and civil servants, who cream off N1.13 trillion (about $4 billion and precisely a quarter of every budget) from the system on a yearly basis. Almost N1 trillion of that amount was spent on all sorts of allowances and entitlements, including the many big cars that are unique to the Nigerian top public servants and politicians. Elsewhere we don’t see civil servants and political appointees running around in exotic and uber-expensive cars (of which we produce none). I haven’t been to any country where public officials carry on the way they do here. I believe the money they now spend freely is what should have been used to expand the service in the right places so that the people may be served and society can be a little bit saner. NIGERIA IS SIMPLY THE MOST-MISMANAGED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.
6. Indeed, a fairly large and effective public service is the only way of effectively reflating any economy and achieving balance. An economy that relies on its private sector to recover from shocks will only suffer more shocks as the private sector (in chasing profits by taking risks) is wedded to volatility. To this extent, it is evident that Nigeria is on a downward spiral to its own extinction if something is not done urgently. I believe mass youth employment in say, the environmental sector will achieve several things including better security, food poverty reduction, patronage of local goods, patriotism and cohesion, more tourism dollars, lower public health bills among others.
7. An economy with a stable and effective public service will hardly go into recession or depression. And if it does, it will be short-lived. Why? Because the payment of salaries to public sector workers is a surefire way of reflating the economy. It’s a great TRANSMISSION MECHANISM. If two or three out of every 10 workers got some cash flow monthly, the economy would keep moving. In Nigeria, most people are on their own ‘hustling’, while a large number works in rural areas as farmers and okada riders. Even government workers don’t get paid because of the silly excuse that ‘crude oil is not selling’. As I’ve written here before – and in support of a thesis by no less a person than Senator Bola Tinubu – a sovereign country has no excuse waiting for Dollars before it pays its workers. The right thing to do is pay your staff, in your local currency no matter what it takes. Nigeria is in the vice-grip of toxic economics. However, we are also aware that roughly 30% of the numbers listed in our public sector, are ghost workers, no thanks to the same big men and women who use that as excuse for their failures daily.
8. Perhaps the reason why our budget level (per capita) is low compared with other African countries, is that we have a small but also fraudulent and cancerous public sector. Half of what is presently allocated simply disappears into corruption, maybe also because the problems there are so overwhelming that those saddled to solve them have since given up. The public sector is not meant to sit on a country’s commonwealth but to ensure that its potentials are maximized. I had written about this more than two years ago when the debate raged as to Nigeria’s lost of N30 trillion (as alleged by Professor Soludo and the then CBN Governor, Lamido Sanusi, now Emir). See: https://www.dailytrust.com.ng/sunday/index.php/global-connection/19549-so-who-stole-nigeria-s-trillions. Below is what an old friend of mine, and presidential candidate in Cameroun, Professor N.N. Susungi had to say about our economy and its low budgets (driven by low tax compliance and inefficiencies):
“Forget about the GDP Growth Rate and Pay attention to Fiscal Productivity and Tax Revenues. These days when I hear about African countries with high economic growth rates, I yawn because those figures are so misleading. What is important is tax revenues generated by the government because that is the spending power of the country…. The power of the South African Economy is that it generates over $90 billion in tax revenues a year. Nigeria is supposed to be the 2nd economic powerhouse in Africa, but it can only generate $23 billion in tax revenues even though it produces and exports 2.6 million barrels of crude oil per day while Angola generates up to $56 billion in tax revenues for producing around 2 million barrels per day. Nigeria is not an economic giant. It is a large grape fruit which contains no juice. Cameroon’s GDP is $25 billion, but it only generates tax revenues of $5.2 billion while Equatorial Guinea generates $10.2 billion in tax revenues.”
THE EVIDENCE
First of all, the biggest employer in the USA is NOT Walmart. It is the US Department of Defense (DoD), which has over 3,200,000 employees (Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines, and countless Intelligence Agencies). This means almost 1 out of every 100 living Americans – including day old babies and very old retired people, work for US defense. This is probably why the USA has the world on lock down today. That figure -3,200,000 – also translates to perhaps 2% of working age people in the USA. See below:
Source: Forbes Magazine
Merry Xmas, happy boxing day, and a prosperous and productive 2018 ahead. May we not be jobless this year, Amen. More next week
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