Govt Must Invest In Education To Boost Production, Economic Prosperity – Utomi

A Professor of Political Economy, Pat Utomi, compares the quality of life in the 1960s with the current economic reality. For him, the quality of life of the average Nigerian has deteriorated in the last few decades. He says governments at all levels must invest in education to boost production and economic prosperity.

What do you make of the line: ‘happy statistics, unhappy people’, in relation to the rebased Gross Domestic Product (GDP)?

One of the things that troubles me in Nigeria is that we are becoming distracted. One of the things that has happened is this economic stabilisation stuff and statistics. I want to focus on what matters – production – that ultimately determines whether people have a decent quality of life. Is there a strategy to boost production?

The quality of life in Nigeria in 1960 was better than it is today. Look at what happened between 1956 and 1960; you will see the direct impact of industrial input on the quality of life of the Nigerian people. You will see the passionate commitment of politicians to making life better for people. A unique statistic I want to share is that back in those days, a lot of rural dwellers who engaged in commercial agriculture made significant money from selling cocoa, groundnuts, palm produce and all of that. They have savings. If you go back to why banking was natural back in those days, it was because these people made money from commercial agriculture.

So, banks mobilised rural savings and run them to urban areas for lending. I recall at the 1986 Annual General Meeting of the African Development Bank in Cairo, the then-governor of the Central Bank of Gaza made a presentation which tracked these flows of savings in Africa. What has now happened today is that 75% of Nigerians who live in rural areas live in chronic poverty. They don’t have any savings.

The tonic metaphor is that the peasant farmer is so deep in water that even a ripple can drown him. It’s a metaphor of the reality of most people in rural Nigeria. This also talks about the quality of life of the average person.

Does the rebased GDP have any immediate or long-term impact on the Nigerian economy, on the people’s lives?

One of the impacts is that it shows a positive trend, and that positive trend gets taken on by letter. For example, a lender would see that statistic and may give you better interest rates when you come to borrow. Bear in mind that Nigeria is a borrowing country because of its current state of exposure to debt.

The critical thing is output. How do we increase production? A part of how we increase production strategy is education, education, and education. The competitiveness of nations is significantly built around education. We have to learn to respect knowledge, give it its place of credence if we’re going to make progress. I can show you studies that show the direct impact of education and the quality, as well as the rate of output for China.

If we don’t even want to go into statistics, take a very simple conversation that took place between Barack Obama and Steve Jobs in 2011, just a few months before Steve Jobs passed away.

Obama had asked Jobs: ‘Why are you making iPhones in China? Why are you taking all these things to China?’ And very frontally, Steve Jobs said to him: ‘We are trying to beat deadlines. We’re looking for software engineers to put together teams around the United States. We’ve looked at a few places and we’re having difficulty finding enough of these engineers who could work at speed. We discovered that one local government in China has a concentration of software engineers than several states in the United States, and their cost is a quarter or less.

Our country continues to neglect the investment that is required to be made in education. It is fundamentally a problem. Where are the skills you need for manufacturing going to come from? What are the skills that you need to improve to yield in farming? I think that local government is the most important level of government in this regard.

The recent spectacle of students having to write exams with flashlights and lanterns continues to be a troubling one, and we’re just hoping that at some point someone will wake up to it.

Governments are too distracted in Nigeria; politicians are too obsessed with politics. Talking about Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, look at the kind of time this country has wasted talking about somebody. Look at the distraction.

Agriculture is what it is in the United States today because the Congress of the United States looked at the situation 100 and something years ago, and passed certain legislation that transformed agriculture. But here our National Assembly is wasting time talking about whether Natasha should resume plenary or not. It breaks the heart that people are not serious enough in Nigeria.