The latest execrable ranking of Nigeria in the global skills report for 2023 embracing the last position with war-devastated Somalia performing better than Nigeria should be a cause for public concern and outrage especially when viewed in the context of actionable deficits left for the present administration to contend with.
The Global Skills Report 2023 presents data on 100 countries drawn from Coursera’s registered learner base of more than 124 million learners with particular focus on three of the most popular job-relevant skill domains: business, technology and data science.
The lackluster performance of Nigeria on the global stage ranging from ease of doing business to the simple task of meeting our OPEC allocated quotas when other oil producing nations have built capacity to surpass their quotas have made a mess of all the indices of economic growth and consequently widened the poverty net astronomically.
In the midst of this state of anomie comes the new president, Bola Tinubu, who seems to possess the drive and requisite work ethics fitted for such a time as this, running a presidency that extends office hours till late in the night on daily basis and with a philosophy calibrated on the imperative of urgency in fixing Nigeria, the nation is definitely on the path of timeous recovery.
The above highlighted strengths of the president notwithstanding, two things can constitute a chin in his armour.
The first is the over-blotted cost of governance that keeps recurrent expenditure far in excess of capital expenditure. A clinical reform of the national budget must take place going forward. Public office must be made less attractive by reducing outrageous allowances not tangential to the measures of performance.
Related to this is the need to remove the imprimatur of permanence from political office holder’s tenure, a situation where languorous public officials not contributing to the aggregate expectation of Nigerians are left to complete such tenure as we have witnessed in the last eight years leaves much to be desired.
The second maleficent chin in Tinubu’s armour is the mediocre performance at the subnational levels. Governors and council executives consume 60 per cent of national revenue without collectively contributing as much to the revenue pool.
Tinubu should work alongside the National Assembly to reinvent the state assemblies and foster more measurable and accountable legislative oversights.
For a governor to be allowed to appoint 200 special assistants who are remunerated from borrowed funds underscores the decadence of state parliaments.
President Tinubu must bear in mind the fact that Nigerians hardly pay attention to what happens at the sub-national though they consume 60 per cent of the commonwealth.
As states and local governments continue to be the weakest link in the chain of renaissance, their opaque public accounting and the emperor-like temperament of the governors keep public focus away from them, leaving citizens to see the federal government as the only tier of government worth holding accountable.
The way to manage the excesses of governors and their local councils without infringing on separation of powers would be the recondite tasks before the president and his think factories to fathom but surely not a task to be left at the whims of political expediency.
My humble prognosis on this would be to establish a neutral ombudsman that would beam a critical searchlight on the activities of state governors and their council viceroys using globally recognised key performance indicators to rate tectonic deliverables of states, recommend rewards for performing states and expose dereliction of mediocrity of states where identified.
This denouement if escalated to federal ministries and parastatals has a potential to engender healthy competition that can shore up Nigeria’s impetus for appreciable sectoral global rankings in the foreseeable future.