I read a brilliant but sobering article titled Nigeria Actually a Poor Country, attributed to my friend Ben Akabueze. I couldn’t help but agree with his submission that Nigeria is indeed a poor country. A quick take at some data will aid our conversation.
In 2024, Nigeria’s national budget of The 2024 Budget of ‘Renewed Hope’ is N27.5 trillion (equivalent to $36.7 billion), at ₦800 to the dollar at the current ₦1600, the budget is now about $18.3 billion. Let’s compare to our peer: Egypt’s national budget is ($97.41bn) for 2023-2024. That is five times our national budget, with half our population at 111 million Egyptians.
South Africa’s GDP per capita is $5,975 (2024), while Nigeria’s GDP per capita stands at $1,110 (2024 estimates). A multiple of four.
To bring it nearer home, according to Statisense, the total education budget for all Nigerian states (minus Rivers State) in 2024 is approximately ₦2.285 trillion. In US dollars, at a conversion rate ₦1600, it is $1.43 billion.
For comparison, the budget of Montgomery County, Maryland, for Public Schools in 2024 is $3.1 billion, twice the size of our 36 state’s education budget.
Montgomery spends $ 3.1 billion to provide free education to about 170,000 students. Nigerian states devote half that amount of money to educating over 20 Million students.
To further illustrate the point, the University of Ibadan’s budget of 23.4bn for over 33,000 students translates to about $435 per student. At the same time, Montgomery County (local government) spends $18,000 per student for elementary and secondary school students. Various academic studies agree that expenditure per student is not the single determinant of success, but the quality of learning declines below a certain threshold.
South Africa’s University of Cape Town and Egypt’s University of Cairo are government-owned, and average tuition and residence costs for nationals are about $4000 per academic year. In Nigeria, the annual tuition and non-catering residence cost for a medical student at the University of Nigeria is about $80.
The tertiary education tuition cost for Nigerian university students is anchored on the philosophy of “Nigeria is a rich country”. The challenge is the declining cost per student and the worsening conditions of our public universities is gravely affecting the quality and ranking of Nigerian students and universities.
The impact of the decline is visible: collapsing and decaying Infrastructure, poor quality of instruction and research as good hands exit the classrooms due to poor remuneration and degrading work environment.
We must understand that we cannot fund our current lifestyle as a nation, even if a single dime is not stolen via our country’s monumental and entrenched corruption.
Our resources do not match our population and appetite.
We must end our post-independence military-designed distributional national framework and begin a new order. At the core of this new order is accepting our low-income status and the need to re-engineer our governance model from the distributive mindset at the heart of our civil service and public policy to a constructive mindset.
Re-engineering from a distributive to constructive ethos should be the task of Nigeria at 64 – because we are poor but with great potential. The time to start is Now.
Osita Chidoka
30 September 2024
Photo credit: Thisday Newspapers
