Education And Election, Which Is Important? -By Rabiu Oladele

Nigerian girls from Regina Pacis School Onitsha becomes the world Champion In science competition

In life, what you pay importance to is what you end up knowing more about, if you pay attention to how punters places bets, its most likely you get to know how to predict and place bets and eventually become better on it.

From the teachings of prophet Muhammad (SAW), he said that Muslims should pay huge attention and importance to these three sectors. He said, TEACHING, TRADING, and AGRICULTURE should be most emphasized on because he understood that any nation that focus on these three sectors, will definitely grow and be self-actualized.

If you also study the teachings of Jesus Christ, you will understand that one thing you can’t separate from him is his TEACHINGS. He is always teaching his congregations and also his disciples. They didn’t just choose to do these, but because they both understood it’s the best way of developing any nation.

Also if you trace back to the people of the early days, they really emphasize on these things because they know it’s the best way they can help build their environment.

Knowing fully the importance of education, the United Nation suggested that every nation should have at least 26% of its national budget dedicated to education and this is because they want every nation to develop.

It will interest you that in Nigeria, the budget allocated to education in 2017 was 7.4% of the budget of the nation which was 7.4trillion naira. The budget for education amounted to the sum of 549billion naira in which 398billion was meant for recurrent expenditure and 95billion was for universal basic education (UBEC) and the remaining 56billion was meant for capital expenditure. This is the reason I wasn’t really surprise when there wasn’t improvement in the facilities of our educational institution for that same year.

I was thinking since there was industrial action by the staffs of the universities in the year 2017 due to the government not providing enough facilities for the educational sector will make the government want to look more into the sector and have an improved budget for the year 2018 but to my surprise, the government budgeted the sum of 8.6trillion naira for its national budget and the budget for education amounted to the sum of 605.8billion naira in which 435.1billion was meant for recurrent expenditure and 109.06billion was for universal basic education (UBEC) and the remaining 61.73billion was meant for capital expenditure.

If you look at the face value of the budget for education for the two years, you will want to think there is an improvement but, do not be deceived, it wasn’t an improvement but reduction. In 2017, the percentage dedicated for education was 7.4% and in 2018, it is 7.04 of the total budget and this is never an improvement.

Nigeria is not near what was advised by United Nation to have as a budget for education in any nation who really want to improve in the educational sector because 7.04% is never close to having 26%. Now I can understand why we are having dilapidated facilities in our educational institutions all over the country

Another thing we should pay interest to is the amount budgeted for capital expenditure in the educational sector, it is not encouraging at all. If we really what a change in this sector, having averagely 55billion for capital expenditure is disgusting when Lagos Ibadan express is budgeted within that same range, so we need to ask ourselves, which is important, building roads or building a nation by investing in the educational sector. Do not get me wrong on this, it’s good to construct roads but never to the detriment of educational sector of any nation that if we get it right, we will have enough professionals that will construct our roads at a reduced rate considering bringing in expatriates from other countries.

I thought I had seen it all, not until I saw the budget that was submitted to the house of assembly some weeks ago for the conducting of the general election in the year 2019. It was budgeted to spend the sum of 254 billion and I just had to open my mouth and keep wondering how Nigeria my country arrived HERE because we now even pay attention more to election which will last for weeks than education that will last till eternity. So adding up the capital expenditure budgeted for education for the past four years will still not be up to what we have budgeted for general election, this is what I see as MURDER of education in Nigeria. Then, it’s no surprise that we are having 10.5million out of school children in Nigeria being the highest that has ever been seen in the world, we will continue to see this not until something drastic is done to the sector.

Now we hardly have public libraries in our communities, we can’t have access to books to read, even the public libraries available has no current edition of books in it. Now, how do we learn? How do we build ourselves? How do we build our nation Nigeria?

There is this general saying that “build a child and build a nation, neglect a child and a Nation is DESTROYED”. Let’s not also forget the YORUBA adage that says” if we build houses to the detriment of building our children, the children are the ones that will sell the houses even in our presence and there will be little or nothing we can do about that”

I will want to leave us to dwell on this and suggest in the comment box on possible solutions to do, we never know, an influencer might be reading this.

RABIU OLADELE
Professional Digital marketer/ Social Reformist/ Activist/ A member of Arise O Youth Forum