“Nigeria must increase her productive base thereby increasing government revenue from increased taxes and then there will be more money for development of shared infrastructure for us all. Also with increased productive base comes more jobs and economic opportunities for her citizens. So I believe our focus should not be heavily on cutting cost when there is still so much room for productive growth in Nigeria.” C.A. commenting on my LinkedIn feed.
This is the point I am trying to make here. If our budget is $24 billion for 200 million citizens and South Africa is $122 billion for 60 million people, focusing on reducing the $24 billion in the name of cost cutting will not advance us! My point is this – Nigeria is not spending enough and efforts should be on improving productivity to ramp up the national revenue via efficient taxation and fees. With that, we will have more money to spend.
People, nothing like that. This is one area our successive governments have failed Nigerians: no one has told us that we are relatively “severely” poor, and exceedingly underperforming as a nation. Nigeria does not have excess spending problem – the fact remains that Nigeria does not even have enough to spend (note that I am not arguing on the efficiency of the “little” spending).
Nigeria’s national budget is $24 billion for 2019. South Africa budgeted $122 billion. South Africa spends 50% of our national budget on healthcare alone! Yet, Nigeria’s population is more than 3 times South Africa’s. I do not share this without the consciousness that I carry the Nigerian passport.
On corruption, we can cut 99% of procurement fraud (a big part of our national demon) within 3 months. Doing that saves 15% I had expected is lost in the national budget to corruption. This is my plan with video.
Nigeria does not have a spending problem (minus the corruption). As a nation, we are under-spending. We need to ramp up our budget while eliminating corruption and advance our citizens.
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This is the end game: that Nigeria’s national cake above needs to grow from $500 billion to $3 trillion by 2030. The ingredients (massive national accumulated capabilities across many fields and domains) are there. What remains is a compass from political leaders, and giving young people the opportunity to bake a bigger cake for shared prosperity. #TheRoadTo3T
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That compass is becoming extremely difficult to acquire, let alone trying to use it.
The fear is not that the current ruling class is performing abysmally, but that the ones waiting on the wings to succeed them haven’t shown much signs that they know better, and therefore can do better. So it’s no longer much about replacing the current holders of power, rather to ensure that those who want to taste power also understand what needs to be done and have what it takes to drive Nigeria forward.
Blaming everything on corruption is ill advised, poor thinking and lack of visioning capabilities cannot be blamed on corruption, they are defects in their own right; it’s where Nigeria and Nigerians have failed most.
In the meantime, the jury is still out there.