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T H I S D AY, T H E S U N D AY N E W S PA P E R ˾ AUGUST 12, 2018
SUNDAY INTERVIEW
The Less You Spend on Education the More You Have to Spend on Security Continued from Page. 75
I am not Muhammadu Buhari. I do not make promises I cannot keep. I am assuring Nigerians that I will keep this promise. I am making it out here in the open. I am willing to sign a written document. If you or any other Nigerian can come up with an iron-clad legal document that binds me, I am willing to publicly commit to it
Even that statement itself is a cry for restructuring. The man is admitting that there is nothing he can do, within the current structure, other than to pray. That means the current structure, by his own admission, is not working. If we restructured and had community policing, the man would not be in such dire straits. The Imam of Nghar village, in Barkin Ladi Local Government Area of Plateau State saved 300 Christians by hiding them in his mosque during the recent crisis. By that singular act, Alhaji Abdullahi Abubakar saved 300 lives. That was a community solution to a community challenge. Now put your thinking cap on. Imagine how much safer that community would be if they practised community policing, which relied on community leaders like Imam Abdullahi Abubakar? Even in revenue generation, I came up with the idea of matching grants when I gave a speech at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, on April 25, 2018. Matching grants would motivate our states to be less dependent on federal allocation and more dependent on internally generated revenue. Today, both the Federal Government and the states are broke. They depend on loans to even pay salaries and in the midst of that, someone is saying that we do not need restructuring. Reality departed from such a fellow a while ago! How do I plan to restructure the country if elected? Restructuring is a process, not an event. However, I have said it that I would restructure Nigeria within six months of being elected. First of all, no state will get less than what they are currently getting from the federation account. In fact, they will get more. That is what my initiative of matching grant is all about. I only need a constitutional amendment if I want to take power and resources away. I do not need to amend the constitution to give power and resources away. Let me give you an example. There are several federal government-owned assets and projects wasting away in Lagos and other states. I do not need a constitutional amendment to call the Lagos State government or governments of the other states and say take over these assets and projects and whatever monies they generate. I do not need a constitutional amendment to transfer universities from the Federal Government to the state government. I only need an Executive Order. Ditto for returning schools to the missions and religious organisations, which once owned them. The most vital part of restructuring is the devolution of powers, not the accumulation of powers and it is easier to give powers away than to take them from the federating units.
quantities in the East. He was not threatened by it. He was overjoyed. His vision was that the North would grow more food that the other regions would be in a better position to buy. Is that not genius? Does that sound like someone who would be against restructuring? Now coming back to the present time, even though Nigeria did not become the world football champions at the World Cup, I am so glad that our Russia 2018 World Cup Team was constituted the way it was. Ahmed Musa, a northerner, was the Most Valued Player on the Super Eagles squad. He delivered goals. Ahmed Musa has proved some people’s fears to be unfounded. Through his talents, he has demonstrated that there is no part of Nigeria that is without talents. He has shown that we can run our government and our civil service based on merit, instead of ethnicity and religion. Just last week, the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board revealed that the best overall scorer in this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination came from Borno State. Borno State! Think about that! Stereotypes are dying. Let us give them a proper burial and move on without them. There is support for restructuring nationwide and there is resistance to it countrywide. Let us not make northerners a convenient scapegoat just because Buhari, who does not want restructuring, is a northerner.
so that we can collectively increase our investments in the education sector. The fastest way out of Third World status for any nation is by educating youths and women. The whole purpose of the National Youth Service Corps was to improve national cohesion by involving Nigerian graduates in the development of the country. If I am elected as the president, all members of the National Youth Service Corps would have only three options on where to serve. You either teach, or you farm or you treat people in a hospital or clinic. No exception, even if you are my own biological child or grandchild. If I am elected as the president, I will ensure that the education sector attracts the best brains by working with the states to achieve targeted salary increase for teachers and lecturers. You cannot have a local government councillor earning more money than a lecturer and expect our best brains to be attracted to the academia. I would change that. I was shocked to find out that Nigerians spend a billion dollars to educate their children in Ghana every year. When you add the cost of educating their wards in Europe and America, you are looking at a further $1 billion. I am assuring you that if we invest in our education sector and make it as good as Ghana’s and definitely even better, that $2 billion will no longer leave Nigeria. It will circulate internally and boost the quality of our education and the value of our Naira.
The entire educational system in the country has collapsed. We now produce fourth grade graduates. Nigerian universities are hardly among the top 500 universities in the world. Our public schools are in a sorry state because leaders like you have not done what you ought to have done. Now that you have broken with that class of leaders and you tell us that you want to solve the problem, tell us where you are going to start from and how you are going to do this? Well, you can only hold me vicariously liable as a member of the political class, but you cannot hold me personally responsible because when our administration came into being in 1999 the situation was already bad. However, by 2007 when we left, we made it better than we met it. Our administration increased the salaries of teachers and lecturers. We committed a higher sectorial allocation to education than what was the norm before us. And when you look at what I have done in my personal capacity, you must admit that, perhaps, no other individual or group of individuals has committed the quantum of investments I have committed to education. I did not found the American University of Nigeria, Yola, to make money. It is my biggest community development project. Chibok girls are there on scholarship. I was an indigent student. I was an orphan as a child. So I know what it is to struggle. As a result, the American University of Nigeria, Yola, has opened up its doors to those who would not ordinarily have been able to attend. If we want to fix education in Nigeria, we must do the same thing. We must commit to investing in education because no other investment yields a greater interest. If I am elected as the president, I would sit with the heads of the legislature and the judiciary and appeal to their sense of nationalism. We must all reduce our recurrent expenditure
Recently, you were said to have promised to devote 21 per cent of your national budget to education. Tell us, how you will do this because we actually need a concrete plan of action and specificity in this regard? Yes, I did make that commitment and I make it here again. I pledge that if I am chosen by my party, the Peoples Democratic Party, to be its presidential candidate, and if I am subsequently elected as the President by Nigerians, I will go above and beyond the United Nations’ recommendations and ensure that a minimum of 21 per cent of the federal budget is devoted to education. Beyond that, I will reserve 10 per cent of that amount to further and continuous education for our public school teachers. Nigeria’s education sector must progress from creating job seekers. We must train our teachers to train our children to be job creators as well. As for the specifics, for the last 10 years, Nigeria has budgeted the equivalent of $30 billion at the federal level, give or take. Twenty-one per cent of that is about $6.5 billion. I already mentioned to you that if elected as the president, I would sit with the heads of the legislature and the judiciary for the purpose of coming to an agreement on how we can scale down our overheads. On the side of the executive, there are so many things we can cut down on. Recently, I wanted to go to Azerbaijan and I found out that they don’t have an embassy in Nigeria or any other country near Nigeria. To get a visa, you apply online to their foreign office. Nigeria maintains literally hundreds of embassies and foreign missions in multiple nations that we really do not need. We can close down two-thirds of these missions and have one embassy service as many as four nations in the geographic vicinity. We can use technology to provide consular services. In 2018, we budgeted N63 billion for recurrent expenditure in foreign affairs. Under an Atiku presidency, we would
NIGERIA
2019
As you know, restructuring is not particularly popular among the northern elite. How are you going to convince them that this is the best way to realise Nigeria’s economic and human capital potentials? That is a myth. Unfortunately, this presumption has discouraged many true proponents of restructuring. Those who perpetuate this falsehood are attempting to rewrite history. Let me tell you, when General Aguiyi Ironsi came up with the controversial Unification of Assets Decree No. 34 of 1966, it was not the West or Midwest that resisted it. It was not the East. It was the North that rejected it and for good reason. Northern Nigeria is capable of feeding not just the whole of Nigeria, but the whole of Africa. That was why the Sardauna was so happy with the discovery of oil in commercial