ON Thursday, during a special National Economic Council (NEC) meeting presided over by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, governors from the 36 states or their deputies, the billionaire philanthropist and Co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mr, Bill Gates and Africa’s richest entrepreneur, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, the grim realities of the Nigerian nation sinking deeper into economic gloom if nothing tangible is done in terms of heavy investments in its vast human capital was echoed by everyone and anyone who mounted the podium. Whilst representatives of the development partners rolled out discouraging and, sometimes, heart-wrenching figures to buttress their arguments that we have, indeed, failed to invest in Nigeria’s greatest asset for a technologically and knowledge-driven future its people, the pictures painted by the Minister of Health, Prof Isaac Ajewole and his counterpart in the Education Ministry, Alhaji Adamu Adamu, confirmed the ‘blunt’ depressing facts which Gates was to later reel out to the audience.
One after the other, the various speakers rub the facts on our faces. Nigeria, they say, has the highest figure of out-of-school children in the world and presently without a functional investment in human capital. The country is also rated as “one of the most dangerous places to give birth, with the fourth worst maternal mortality rate in the world, ahead of Sierra Leone, Central African Republic and Chad”, in addition to the crying fact that, statistically, one in three Nigerian children is chronically malnourished. Those were the words of Gates even if they are the notoriously true. And, in spite of all the efforts presumably being made by the government to change the narrative, Nigeria remains a low income country no thanks to policies that are incapable of guaranteeing a ‘foundation for sustained prosperity” with the vast majority of its people barely living from hand to mouth. No picture could be grimmer than this I guess.
Some would ask: what has all these got to do with Dapchi, a town in Yobe State where 110 girls were criminally abducted and, eventually, heroically returned earlier this week? Well, a lot. In my mind, Dapchi, like Chibok, is a metaphor for all that is good and bad about Nigeria. Since the abduction and return of the girls, Nigerians have been at their mischievous best in interrogating the matter. When I speak of the scary figures, statistics and data being rolled out to justify why Nigeria needs to do more in the area of investment in human capital, what those in authorities do about it would depend on their beliefs. For example, all the pontifications by Gates and the other partners may come to naught if the government views the figures as concocted or an attempt to smear its image and bring it into disrepute with its teeming supporters. On the other hand, the government could decide to sift through the messages no matter how distasteful they seem to be and kick start the process of investing on its future assets, the people. It’s all about the belief that would an action or inaction!
And that is where Dapchi comes in because the abduction affects a key factor in human capital development for an economically sustainable future education especially that of the girl-child which is already at an abysmally low figure in some communities. It is sickening that, in returning the girls in commando style back to their anguished parents, the insurgents were said to have strictly warned the Dapchi parents to stop, forthwith, the idea of sending their children to learn what they perceived as “Western education”, adding with irritating glee that the entire saga was not “terrorism but just to teach us a lesson!” Now, that should scare anyone that can make some sort of sense out of all that was said in the Banquet Hall of Aso Rock that day. When bandits enjoy the liberty to scare the hell out of hardworking parents whose only ‘crime’ was sending their wards to acquire the kind of knowledge that would place them at a competitive advantage in the foreseeable future, then we all need to get worried, don’t we?
Listen to Gates: “The most important choice you can make is to maximise your greatest resources, the Nigerian people. Nigeria will thrive when every Nigerian is able to thrive. If you invest in their health, education and opportunities the “human capital” we are talking about today then they will lay the foundation for sustained prosperity. If you don’t however, than it is very important to recognise that there will be sharp limit on how much the country can grow.”
Read Also:
And so, in looking at the long term effects of the madness going on in the North-East and some other parts of the country, we must admit that we may just be digging craters that would doom our future prospects especially with the silly rants and the shockingly inhumane attitudes some of us have displayed in expressing our opinions on the Dapchi abduction. In saying this, I must admit that this government didn’t help matters in its shoddy handling of information flow surrounding the abduction, search and subsequent return of the girls. When the government, through its officially-recognised spokespersons, started bandying different figures on the number of girls that were returned by the bandits, the negotiation that took place before they were taken back to their parents, why it didn’t insist on the return of the Christian lady that refused to succumb to the blackmail of converting to Islam, how five or four of the girls died in captivity and if ransom was paid or not, it goes without saying that the government created a veritable ground for mischief makers to make bankable permutations of what they tagged a stage-managed abduction drama. Pity.
While conceding that certain things just didn’t add up in the many stories flying around concerning the Dapchi girls, I also believe that many of the commentators on both sides of the divide are far gone in their political coloration of events of such nature thereby making objective reasoning a near impossibility. Those Dapchi girls, we must remember, are just part of the lucky few that survived in a country described as ‘one of the most dangerous to give birth” with “one in three children chronically malnourished.”
It is important that we place things in proper context before running our mouths against Mr. Gates for, some would say, daring to count our ‘nine fingers’ in our presence. Question is: why is the Nigerian elite and its fawning poor scared of being told the glaring truth about the way we ruin our future? We may not like it but the Dapchi girls, like many of us, are the collective victims of a dying health system which Adewole, our own Health Minister, said has not delivered qualitatively from all indicators and with meagre resources allocated, and mostly mismanaged, since May 1999 when democracy was reborn in Nigeria. They are potential startup entrepreneurs or part of the talent pool that the likes of Dangote would readily employ to drive the economy, provided they are allowed to get the basic skills, are in good health with good education to boot. When insurgents are allowed to implant such grave fear in the minds of the parents of these little ones about education, is there any hope that the narrative would change in the year 2050 when, as projected, Nigeria would be the third or fourth largest population in the world?
For those who were not at the venue, Gates’ tone was not that of an arrogant billionaire rubbing the noses of the beneficiaries of his wealth on a rocky plain. Instead, his was an appeal to commonsense. Take, for example, what he said about the plight of the average farmer who, in spite of the availability of internet banking, has no access to any feasible loan initiative to grow his business. Now contrast that to the unlimited access that federal ministers, lawmakers and their cronies have to the banks where they are offered facilities running into billions of naira, just to satisfy their hedonistic taste! Just the other day, a Federal Minister boldly told Nigerians that the multimillion naira mansions linked to him within three years of being in office were procured through bank loans without anyone asking what collateral he deposited for the deal. To a businessman like Gates, this just doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately, that is the story the rest of the world read about us here -investing in self, like senator who rake home N13.3m monthly as ‘running cost’, rather than on things that would benefit the generality. Gates and other development-minded persons just can’t understand the whole essence of these primitive proclivities in a modern world!
What exactly is Knucklehead driving at in all this? Dapchi should not be another passing phase in our scandalous book of political chicanery and vainglory. In any case, it shouldn’t have happened if those saddled with the responsibility of keeping the region safe didn’t shirk or abdicate that onerous responsibility. With the Chibok experience still fresh in our memories and the much-touted news of a ‘degraded ‘Boko Haram insurgents, how did they regroup and succeeded in inflicting pain and anguish in Dapchi? What could have given them the courage to drive triumphantly into the same territory, playing with the residents and having ‘selfie’ moments with them before barking orders at them to stop sending their children to schools teaching Western education? Where does that leave us in a bid to tap the potentials imbued in our greatest asset as a nation -the human capital?
By all means possible, the primitive echo of the Boko Haram rant against the education of these young ones should be nipped in the bud. The schools in those areas must be open and made to function because any shut down of education in the region would have direct deleterious impact on the general health of the nation as a whole. In his observation, Gates warned that though the government’s Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) speaks about the need to invest in the people, the “execution priorities don’t fully reflect people’s needs by prioritising physical capital over human capital.” He also noted that to anchor our long-term economic prospects on investments in infrastructure and competitiveness without sundry investments in the people through quality education and health is a recipe for a painfully unsustainable economy. And this, I must say, starts with the kind of scary scenario that played out in Dapchi. It resonates in the fact that these criminal elements are still holding on to Leah Sharibu for insisting on her fundamental rights to freedom of education, association and, above all, religion. That is the dream they want to kill at incubation. That is the fear they plan to inflict on the rest of us. And that is how they hatch the plan to kill our future!…
