- President’s pledge to raise education funding is good, but redeeming it is better
The declaration was made during the Global Education Summit in Financing Global Partnership for Education (GPE), 2021-2025, co-hosted in London by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Mr Boris Johnson, and President Kenyatta, and designed to give leaders the opportunity to make five-year pledges to support the GPE’s efforts to help transform education systems in about 90 countries and territories.
This commitment by Presidents Buhari and Kenyatta aims at ensuring access to quality and inclusive education for the citizenry of their respective countries, particularly the girl child, by improving learning outcomes through strengthening educational institutions, encouraging better teaching capacity and promoting greater adoption of technology. Apart from promising more efficient use of the envisaged increased investment in education, the leaders plan to mobilise additional financial resources through legal frameworks and deliberate intervention on a sustainable basis. These are no doubt noble intentions deserving of commendation if they are sincerely implemented.
All too often, when leaders make these types of attractive and admirable promises as part of a group decision, they tend to amount to no better than fashionable rhetoric. A good example are the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agreed to in Y2000 by leaders of 189 countries to substantially reduce poverty in their respective jurisdictions by 2015. Despite the fanfare that heralded this initiative, hardly a dent was made on global poverty levels as promised and there is no indication that the succeeding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), currently being implemented, are faring any better.
If the President Buhari administration can summon the will and demonstrate the competence to achieve this admittedly Herculean objective, it will have a most salutary impact on the country’s educational system, which is currently utterly dysfunctional at all levels. The example of the advanced and most prosperous countries of the world shows that no country can make desirable and meaningful socio-economic and technological progress without massive investment in education. Unfortunately, insufficient allocation of funds to this critical sector in Nigeria over the years is responsible for the dilapidated infrastructure, inadequate facilities, dearth of equipment, low quality of instruction, poor staff morale and incessant strikes by public sector unions that have crippled education and thereby hampered development.
In the 2021 budget, for instance, the Buhari administration allocated N742.5 billion to education, which was the lowest in 10 years when measured as a percentage of the total budgetary outlay of N13.08 trillion. Comparatively, for instance, in the 2015 budget, prepared by the previous President Goodluck Jonathan administration in 2014, N484.7 billion constituting 10.7% of the total budget plan was allocated to education. The allocations to education in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 were N393.8 billion (9.3%), N468.3 billion (9.86%), N499.7 billion (10.1%) and N494.7 billion (10.5%) respectively. However, in 2016, the budgetary allocation to education was N369.6 billion (7.9%), N550.5 billion (7.4%) in 2017, N605.8 billion (7.04%) in 2018, N620.5 billion (7.05%) in 2019 and N671.05 billion (6.7%) in 2020.
It is indeed a good thing if the Buhari administration sees the need to improve on its record of budgetary allocation to education and invest more substantially in the sector over the next two years. Given the budgetary allocation to education this year as stated above, for instance, the President’s promise implies that the administration plans to increase spending on education to over one trillion Naira annually within the two years. While this is no doubt a humongous increase, it is not unrealisable given Nigeria’s abundant resource endowment, despite the country’s protracted economic crisis. This would, however, imply that the administration pursues more vigorously its war against flagrant, large-scale looting of public resources, boost its revenue sources as well as ensure greater discipline and prudence in the management of public expenditure.
