According to the budget office, Nigeria budgeted N127b on education in the year 2021 while it spent N121b on security. The 2022 budget estimates however showed that the security budget had risen to N2.1t while that of education stood at 1.29t, a development which was roundly criticized by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Speaking in Kano, he Senior Education Manager, UNICEF Field Office, Kano, Mr. Michael Banda argued that Nigeria’s education budget for the current year should have been N1.14 trillion, an equivalent of 8.4 per cent of the country’s total annual budget and not 5.4 per cent as is the case.
Banda had argued that with the dwindling allocation, the sector would suffer more in school enrolment and in the retention of school children, adding that without adequate investment in the education sector, health and other sectors were bound to suffer eventually.
Lamenting the lackluster attitude of the government towards adequately funding education, the UNICEF Chief had asserted that “just when it was concluded that the 2021 budget was the worse in 10 years since 2011, that of 2022 was recorded to have a saddening decimal.”
Regretting that “one out of five out-of-school children in the world was a Nigerian”, Banda pointed out that both individuals and the countries benefit from investment in education.”
According to him, “In 2021, the country’s education budget was 5.6 percent of the total budger. In light of the 50 per cent increment which was promised by the federal government, the education budget, which in 2021 was estimated to be 6.7 percent, ought to be 8.4% in 2022. Unfortunately, it was a mere 5.4 percent.”
While security is of course the prime consideration of any responsible government, it becomes depressing when one considers the almost total breakdown of the country’s security apparatus over this period, especially given the humongous amounts spent on that sector.”
In any sane development minded society, education ranks next to security considerations, if not higher, but in Nigeria’s typically convoluted case, that is not the case.
It is an open secret that Nigeria’s education system has suffered steady decline due to government neglect despite series of strikes by lecturers and other categories of staff.
These strikes are usually instigated by the Federal government through non-implementation of agreements it willingly entered into with these labour organizations. Ironically, the FG turns round to blame the Unions it is persecuting! And then the same government, playing God, imposes an unfair and unjustifiable ‘no work no pay’ regime in efforts to starve the staff back to work. This in stark ignorance of the fact that, in truth, lecturers never go on strike, for even during the so called ‘strikes’, all serious lecturers still spend sleepless nights on research as they plan ahead for whenever government recalls them to campus. It is preposterous!
It is in the light of this that one fully supports ASUU and NLC with all its affiliates in its current struggle to get the Federal government to immediately rescue the nation’s education sector. This is one fight we must all support because the country’s very future depends on it.
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