The Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the last general elections, former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, said the country cannot grow without investing in education.
Atiku, who stated this at Founder Day Ceremony of the American University of Nigeria, Yola, said invest in education is such a notorious fact that it is almost a cliché.
“The reason why we have insecurity is because we have poverty, and the reason why we have poverty is because we have illiteracy. It is a cycle that we can only break by educating our people. For the past four years, our education budgets have demonstrated the fact that developing the minds of our people has not been our priority.”
Waziri Adamawa further stated “Education is the principal thing. When we get this right, we will get Nigeria right. The easiest way, to make the most significant impact, in the shortest amount of time, is via education.
“As proof, I cite the fact that 2014 represented the year Nigeria invested the most in education with a ₦493 billion allocation (then the equivalent of $3.3 billion) to education, representing 9.94 percent of the total budget.
“The very next year, the trio of the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, and CNN Money rated Nigeria as the third fastest-growing economy in the world. Again, I ask, was that a coincidence?
“What I propose is that the federal, states, and local governments should consider a policy of allocating at least 10 percent of the total budget appropriations to the education sector. If insanity is doing the same thing and expects different results, it follows that the sane thing to do is that when you get a result that you like, you are challenged to repeat the process, and in fact, improve upon it, so that you can get the same or perhaps improved results.
He also lamented that “Very sadly, we have bequeathed to your generation a Nigeria that is the world headquarters for extreme poverty. The only way we can turn that around is via education. The word coincidence keeps popping up today. Obviously, it cannot be any coincidence that we are also the global capital for out of school children, with approximately 13 million Nigerian children out of the formal education system.
“If we can find a way to ensure that all Nigerian children leave school with at least basic reading and writing abilities, we would have found a way to end extreme poverty in Nigeria, which is why we must devote the bulk of our resources to education”.
