More knocks for Nigeria at 59

There was not too much to cheer as Nigeria marked her 59th independence anniversary on October 1, SAMSON BENJAMIN, who spoke with experts on the state of critical sectors including education, health, power and security reports.

Tuesday, October 1, 2019, was a significant day for Nigerians both at home and abroad as the country celebrated its 59th anniversary of independence from Britain.

The day presented opportunity for leaders at various levels of governance as well as citizens to reflect on how far we have come as a nation and how far we still need to go. Nigeria is perceived as the natural leader of Africa and the world largely hinges its hope of Africa’s development and freedom from underdevelopment, illiteracy, hunger and unemployment on Nigeria.

The general belief is that if Nigeria gets it right, many other African countries, which look up her as big brother, would naturally follow suit. The hope is not misplaced given the country’s vast natural and human resources.

Nigeria is the most populated country on the continent; it is also one of the most endowed in the world. It is rich in crude oil, natural gas, and gold, among others. The country is blessed with arable land which facilitates the cultivation of both cash and food crops.

Nigeria is also endowed with human capital that stand out in different aspects of human endeavours. This is a rare combination that should have made Nigeria a superpower. But in spite of all these endowments, Nigeria is still struggling to take her rightful place among committee of nations. We are also backward as far as basic infrastructure that trigger development are concerned.

Experts who spoke with Blueprint Weekend expressed disappointment with successive government on the state of critical infrastructure in the country.

Same old story in health

In chat with our correspondent on state of health sector, Dr Fedelis Okeke of Bishop Shanahan Hospital Enugu identified factors responsible for the woos of the sector to include: long years of neglect, policy summersault, poor condition of service for health workers, among others.

He said: “It is an undeniable fact that in the last 59 years of Nigeria’s history, her health sector like other sectors of the country’s economy has had its good and bad times with uninspiring national health indices attributable to years of cumulative insults, lack of professional order and best practices, a weak private health sector, poorly developed social infrastructure, as well as policy inconsistency.

“It is troubling that after 59 years of Nigeria’s independence, her health system is still struggling to deliver health dividends of democracy to her long suffering people.

“Nigerians had expected that following the Walter-Harkness Ten Year Development Plan as well as the enunciation of the first National Health Development Plan in 1960, Nigeria before half a century of her independence would have achieved Universal Health Coverage with all her citizens having access to quality and affordable healthcare. Sadly, many factors have continually conspired against the realization of this laudable objective.

“A recent report that about 2,500 Nigerian medical doctors of different cadre are going to leave the country in search of better opportunities abroad is a summary of our journey so far in the health sector.

“For sure, this is undoubtedly a reflection of a Nigerian health sector that needs urgent governmental attention. In fact, the wanton lack of requisite facilities, work environment and conditions, career development, and low reward system are among the factors causing the massive exodus of the country’s medical personnel to other countries where they get it better.

“Unfortunately, government has not been able to do much in addressing the perennial challenges in the sector, thereby improving the working condition of medical doctors in the country and giving the profession its deserved pride of place.”

Speaking further he said, “Often, the media had been awash with the news of one industrial action or the other by the members of the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) and its subsidiaries, due to poor welfare, working tools, and condition of service. There are also media reports that some doctors who have been recruited in some public medical institutions have not been paid for several months. Of course, these developments have worsened the conditions which are causing these doctors to leave the country in droves.

“It is even more worrisome that this phenomenon has, over time adversely affected health care delivery, in the sense that it has left enormous workload for the few available medical doctors. Currently, statistics show that the doctor-patient ratio in Nigeria is 1:4,250 patients, which is far below the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation of 1:600 patients. This is, certainly, not acceptable by any standard.

 “More so, the lack of faith by most Nigerian leaders on the country’s health system has worsened the already bad situation. President Muhammadu  Buhari’s long absence from the country for medical treatment abroad in 2017  was an indictment in the lack of confidence in Nigeria’s health sector.”

Okeke called for the declaration of state of emergency in the sector in order to address the challenges confronting the sector.

“Therefore, to address the decay in our health sector, it is imperative for government at both the federal and state to now declare some form of emergency in the nation’s health sector, with a view to revamping the entire system.

“This is a task that can no longer be delayed and must be pursued with an unalloyed political will. Perhaps, when government’s policy to restrict public officials from indiscriminate health tourism abroad is religiously implemented, it will do the country and its health sector a world of good,” he said.

Concerns in education

For the Chairman of the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP) Federal Polytechnic Nasarawa state chapter,  Dr Mamman Nasir, the nation’s education sector is seriously in bad shape and required serious and immediate attention.

He said: “It is no longer news that at 59 Nigerian educational systems, due to an unwholesome combination of neglect and mismanagement, has fallen over the years into a squalid state of disrepair.

“It is no longer news that while in saner societies throughout the world, the teaching profession is considered one of the most important jobs there could be, in Nigeria, teachers are about the most indigent, most derided lot in the polity.

“It is also not a so surprising truth anymore that if the achievement of peace, stability and development is one of the objectives of the Nigerian state at this present time, its school curriculums is ill-equipped to drive the nation towards that goal.

 “The state of education in Nigeria calls for a serious concern. It is no longer a secret that the quality of education in Nigeria requires greater attention and improvement. That our country is facing numerous challenges in education and all other sectors is as a result of historical abuses, mindless impunity and corruption.”

According to him, “With an estimated 13.2 million children out of school, high illiteracy level, infrastructural deficit and decay, unqualified teachers, and inadequate instructional materials, to mention some of the challenges, we can clearly see the effect of decades of neglect that the education sector has suffered.

“We cannot progress beyond the level and standard of our education. Today, it is those who acquire the most qualitative education, equipped with requisite skills and training, and empowered with practical knowhow that are leading the rest. “We cannot afford to continue lagging behind. Education is our launch-pad to a more successful, more productive and more prosperous future.

“One of the primary roles of education is to build and sustain individual and society’s development. It renews and improves the economic, social, political and cultural aspects of any nation. Education upgrades the living standard of citizens and enables people to become better and more productive citizens. It is a human right that creates a safe, healthy and prosperous society.

 “Solving the problems in education might be a challenge, but it is not an impossible one at all. Indeed, it requires more of discipline and due diligence than it requires genius. For a nation that is serious about its own sustenance and improvement, and having realised that these are ultimately tied to the quality of education and the wellbeing of teachers, improving the lot of the teachers in terms of training, remuneration, and general welfare, should be a priority.

Power supply remains mirage

For Engineer Suleiman Ganiyu, the nation’s poor power situation has crippled operations in many sectors of the nation’s economy.

He said investors in many sectors, especially manufacturing, telecoms and agriculture, have been compelled to generate their independent power at higher cost, noting that the high cost of generating power has culminated in the high cost of goods and services, making locally produced goods uncompetitive in the global market. This, he said is mainly because Nigerians depend more on generators to generate power at higher cost than on power companies.

“Over the past decades successive governments have attempted to tackle Nigeria’s energy deficit problem by pumping money into the poorly managed sector. Since the return to civilian rule in 1999, governments have spent an average about US $2bn annually on electricity provision, but with little service improvements to show for it.

“The poor performance of Nigeria’s hitherto state-controlled power sector, resulting in unstable electricity supply and frequent blackouts, has long been seen by ordinary Nigerians as evidence of the ineffectiveness of their governments. However, the situation has not improved much since the privatisation of much of the power sector in recent years.

“Precisely, in August 2010, President Goodluck Jonathan launched the Power Sector Reform Roadmap aimed at shifting the running of power utilities to the private sector. It included the privatisation of the state-owned Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN). And when in late 2013 almost all of the six power-generation plants and 11 distribution companies unbundled from PHCN were eventually sold, there was high public expectation that the new owners would bring a rapid end to frequent power outages in Africa’s largest economy. But current levels of supply and the overall production capacity remain grossly inadequate. For example, Nigeria has a lower electricity capacity than Slovakia, a country with about 3 per cent of Nigeria’s population.

“The privatised electricity firms may have been freed of the state bureaucracy that previously hamstrung their operations, but these utilities still encounter a myriad of structural problems that continue to hamper growth in the power sector.

 Security: From bad to worse?

For a security expert, Dr Ameachi Nwokolo, the security situation has gone from bad to worse as a result of multiple battle grounds in the nation and poor intelligent gathering mechanisms.

He said: “As far as security is concerned we are neither here or there. If you look at the security challenges we have had from the time we got our independence up till now, I will say that more than ever before, things have change dramatically from bad to worse.

“After the civil war we had issues of armed robbery here and there, and that was attributed to leftovers of weapons that people had. That led to increase in cases of armed robbery especially down South. However, the military era witnessed some kind of clamp down and suppression of crime because of their style of government.

“But the return of democratic dispensation in 1999 has changed the dynamics of crime and criminality confronting us as a nation due to the high level of unemployment. We also saw the rise of Boko Haram. The violence has killed thousands of people and forced more than two million from their homes.

“There have also arisen a lot of new conflicts, crimes and criminality. For example the herdsmen/farmers crises has gained fresh and new momentum with ethnic and religious colouration. We have also seen the rising spate of kidnappings in recent times.

“To tackle these challenges, we must reconstruct our national security architecture. Our national security architecture is skewed.  We are coming from militaristic approach. We deploy the military in almost all our security challenges. We have utilized the military instrument without getting result. This is because the nature of crime and criminality has changed.

“Crime is now being perpetuated by the everyday people, non-state actors therefore we need good intelligence gathering, community policing to be able to be able to stop crime before they ever happen. But what are we doing? We are still using the analogue approach which no country in the world is doing; using the military to tackle local crime. The military is not trained for that. We need the everyday people working within the community to be able to counter crime. So we are failing in that aspect.

 “Again nations are spending in modern equipment but what we see in our nation is a situation where budget for security are not spent for the purpose for which it is meant. In most cases the monies are taking away. We must invest in technology; we must install Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) to effectively fight crime.

“The governments at all levels must come out with policies to educate the people to help government in providing security. This is because the government cannot do it alone. We have seen such examples in France and the United states. For example during Boston bombing, it was a restaurant that provided information for security agents. In other words, we need adequate and robust policing driven by well thought out intelligent gathering mechanism because the crime that are been perpetrated in recent times are by non-state actors, the everyday person that you are working with or that you see every day,” he said.

True federalism as panacea

Similarly, a development economist, Mr Paul Ejembi, has said that true federalism is the way out of Nigeria’s myriads of development challenges.

He said: “Nigeria must work to achieve true federalism and must respect the time-honoured principle of subsidiary. A core part of the problem, all this while, has been that no one seems able to do anything without recourse to the federal authority at Abuja, an authority which has clogged itself with a myriad of unachievable functions.

“Time was, when everything important from education to health and justice was well taken care of by local authorities. Things were properly done then and in order, proving that the only way government can truly work is when it is as low as possible and only as high as necessary. May the eyes of those in power in Nigeria today open to this reality,” he said.

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