Nigeria’s education sector has been set back a great deal due to the misplaced priorities of government in terms of budgeting. Policy advisor of the Civil Society Action Coalition on Education for All (CSACEFA), Mr. Wale Samuel, in a chat with STELLA EZE, said that there is a missing link between the budget and its targets, which will not take education to the ‘promised land’, even with the 26 per cent UNESCO benchmark.
Budgeting in education has remained a disturbing issue, being that the sector has remained underfunded and Nigeria has not been able to reach the UNESCO benchmark of 26 per cent of the annual budget. How would you analyse education funding from 1999 to date?
It is a very complex situation. It is not as straightforward as it seems. You know there are a whole lot of indicators that come into play when you talk about budget in the education sector. In Nigeria, for instance, we have a unique template, which is different from the rest of the world when you talk about budget. Traditionally, if you are going to take a radical approach to it, you are supposed to meet the UNESCO benchmark, which is 26 per cent. But when you look at it holistically, that in itself may not solve the problem. You need to break the budget into components. You have to justify the components. It is in doing that that you determine an increase or more effective utilisation. In Nigeria, something that is peculiar to us is the issue of accountability, to the extent that if you succeed in advocating for the 26 per cent, you may not succeed in making the money work for Nigerian children.
On our part, we are advocating for increase and effective utilisation. If you look at the 2011 budget for education, the problem with that budget is the issue of a greater percentage of the budget going to salaries, emoluments and all that. But how does this translate to the classrooms? Personnel is very important in education but at the same time, we don’t think it is smart budgeting when you have about 90 per cent of the budget going into servicing personnel. You are now left with 10 per cent to cover useful things like salaries, instructional materials and infrastructure. You know that we have a problem of quality and when you talk about quality, you talk about teachers. And when you talk about creating more access, you also talk about improving infrastructure.
Linking expenditure to those critical areas of need, it can go from nine to 16 to 17 per cent of the total budget. The issue is when you break it down, is it in consonance with your development objectives?? So there has to be a link with your priorities. You can imagine the issue of girl-child education in the North and again, boys’ education in the East. So these are things we need to tie up to our budgeting process. The kind of budgeting we have now cannot help us achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in education.
You said Nigeria has a unique template. Can you elaborate on that?
The unique template we have is in terms of inefficiency in allocation. Nigeria is one of those countries in the world where by the time you spend N100 on a particular item, by the time you are through, you will be lucky if N2 meets the target, because of issues of corruption, embezzlement and all sorts of issues that are peculiar to us. So you realise that a budget in itself does not necessarily get to the target. It is a case of the more you see, the less you understand. Is the money necessarily addressing the problem? If you cast your mind back to those years when we had budgeting for education, you will realise that the more we budgeted, the more (in most instances) terrible the results we got. If you want to take the indicator, using the WAEC result as an example, it is getting worse by the year.
It shows you there is a problem. The money is not connecting with the problem and if the money is not connecting with the problem, then there is need for us to restructure. We need to restructure our spending pattern because with the way it is now, we cannot make to our much-anticipated target of meeting all the indicators of development as far as education is concerned, by 2015. Quality is not faring any better either, as we see from the year in year out performance of our students. On the issue of access, more students are dropping out of school, especially at the junior secondary school level, possibly because of lack of fulfilment – there is no quality teaching, so why should I waste my time when the school cannot give me a right footing? So there has to be a very radical restructuring of our funding pattern.
How would you describe the budgeting pattern in the last decade?
There are some issues that are not under the direct control of the government, for example, economic factors like inflation. This affects the budget negatively in the long run. So maybe we should have also taken into consideration issues around inflation, so that a budget for 2007 for instance, may have jumped up nominally in figures, not in terms of the true value.? So we should also factor in inflation. It is not just about nominal increase; we should also consider the economic indices. If we don’t do that, we may have just had an increase in naira, but not an increased budget. So whoever prepares the budget must take into consideration these economic indices, especially the Ministry of Finance. But again, we are seeing a disconnect between the education and finance ministries and some other agencies, where the agencies argue on the basis of their needs, while the ministry of finance argues from the economic angle.
This does not really augur well for the economic prosperity of the country. I think these two things should tally and I think that Dr. Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala should take this seriously. Because if you are not careful as an economist, your argument will be more on the economic and financial implications, while the basic needs of the beneficiaries suffer, and in most of the circumstances, the developmental needs would be sacrificed on the altar of economic experience. That is why in Nigeria, people talk about a quantum leap in the economic indices and not what would translate into the quality of life for people. Why the government exists in the first place, is to improve the quality of people’s lives.
But when the government is not improving the quality of life but is busy with improving economic indices, then there is a problem. So these are the things that I think the president and Okonjo-Iweala really need to look at. When you begin to work on your economic indices, remember that it is all about Nigerian children; the Nigerian citizens.
There is a way out. There should be an independent monitoring mechanism put in place by the president. I think that if the government wants to really match the quality of output with the budget, they need to appoint a strong and independent monitoring team that would give feedback as far as budget performance is concerned. And the inspectorate division must also be revived.
The more we budget, the less impact we get. Why is that so?
I will give one example. In civil society, there is what we call community participation. We are saying, let there be the involvement of the community in terms of developing infrastructure and sometimes in salary; that the community should be part and parcel of the budget making process in the sense that they may be independent of government, but would be monitored by government. Already we have a model in the Universal Basic Education (UBE) called the self-help community projects, where communities are given money to build schools. Governor Peter Obi of Anambra State has also adopted this model. This means he allows the people to determine their development objectives and direction. But in Nigeria, we have a bottom-up approach, where government officials sit in the office and don’t know what the real needs of the people are, and so budgets are made based on their imaginations and not based on the needs of the people. So I think it is high time we did a financial devolution of responsibilities to the community level.
So in essence, low budget is not the actual problem, but the misuse of the available one?
We need to look at some issues bordering on the components. The budget must have certain components, which will make it meet the developmental needs of the people. First, the budget has to be broken down. For instance, in a household, you can determine who gets what. There are some things that the family head is entitled to and some the children. But by the time you devote most of the budget to the head, the children will suffer. Likewise, in education, the budget must be seen to be addressing the needs of the vulnerable and the poor. The rich can take care of themselves to a large extent. But unfortunately, in Nigeria we do everything based on the geo-political zones. Whether a zone needs it or not, we have to satisfy our balancing system.
In Nigeria, if the government realises that we have the greatest number of out of school-age children in the world, then our budget should be geared towards addressing access.? The North has the greatest number of school-age children, which should be addressed. But we have the problem of allocation. How efficient is allocation, how efficient is disbursement, how efficient is the monitoring? Because it is a cycle; you want to see how the money has been used.
?