The Director General of the National Orientation Agency (NOA), Dr. Garba Abari has deplored the quality of education in government-owned school saying students of such schools are no different from children in the street without education.
The Director also decried that the Nigerian government pump huge amount of money into social amenities and infrastructure , with nothing to show for it, and yet nobody is being held accountable.
Abari said this at the launch of the Rebuild Nigeria Initiative (RNI)on Friday in Abuja. The initiative is formed by a group of Nigerians including those in the diaspora, as well international partners with the goal of rebuilding the country.
According to Abari, the need to retrieve and rebuild Nigeria has become imperative because “it’s already on the tipping point and that’s why you find all these challenges manifesting in different ways and manner. Rag-tag armies overriding professional armies, bandits taking the state hostage, economic saboteurs. This is actually one of the biggest challenges that we have to face, and which we must able to take the bold initiative to address it by rebuilding the capacity of the state itself.”
There’s the challenge of how to rebuild the Nigerian state, the capacity of the state is being eaten into everyday. We need to retrieve the state first because its already on the
He added that the state has become increasingly more incompetent, “that’s why I said the capacity of the state must be rebuilt. The more we pump money, no result. How do we get to a situation that the majority of people in public schools are not better than those on street in terms of the quality of education, hence you can see the need to retrieve the state, begin a deliberate process of retrieving the state so that its capacity is restored before it can move to the next level of addressing many of the Challenges that abound.”
In his address, Patrick Utomi , a former presidential candidate said some of Nigeria’s problem and the rest of Africa comes from its Natural resources endowment. He decried that the dependence on crude oil is frightening adding that Nigeria had said so much about diversification but have not done much on it.
“For more than 30 years I have heard, the object of policy is to diversify our economy away from mono cultural dependence on crude oil. I mean, I have heard it so many times that it is like playing in my head. Unfortunately, we’ve done very little in that direction.
Utomi, said the has assumed a new urgency because the world is going through an energy transition, which according to him basically means that in 10-12 years from now, few cars will run on petrol.
“So we’ve got to put our hydrocarbons endowment to other kinds of uses. It could not be the staple that we have today and who will be in deep crisis,” he said.
He added that Nigerian government need to also invest in education of the youth stressing that they are the major drivers of any economy.
“This year, about $4 billion of investments are expected to come to Nigeria tech space. It was not through the biggest financial institution in Nigeria, the company started by some young people a couple of years ago called flutterwave.
“They are the ones holding the economy right now. They are doing it in Nollywood. They’re doing it with the music, and all of that. Just imagine that we put cost on them, that we treated them like the kings that they deserved, and really deserved to be treated.
“If we had invested massively in their education. I mean, multiples will go up. We’ve got to stop politicians that take advantage of this easy money that comes into the treasury,” he added.
In his address, the President and convener, Rebuild Nigeria Initiative, said Nigeria is facing challenging time characterized by fault lines borne from ethno-religious conflicts. he urged that a national day for forgiveness and reconciliation be declared in a bid to quell the conflict especially among Christians and Muslims, foster unity, and rebuild Nigeria.