Harvard University’s annual budget is about 3x the total education budget of Nigeria, from primary to university level. That is not news. What is news is that Aliko Dangote will pocket more profits from his empire than the budget of my state of Abia state. Dangote Cement returned profit after tax (PAT) of N276 billion while Abia state will still need loans to fund its N131.8 billion 2021 budget.
Sure, Aliko is not the only shareholder in Dangote Cement. But hold on, add the other pieces in his empire, and he could be going home with more cash than Abia. And remember that Abia is not a small state; it spends more than Kogi, Yobe and a few others.
Now, who has more power to get things done? You can see the power of markets and why entrepreneurial capitalism should be supported because nations can only rise when entrepreneurs do. The money Elumelu, Ovia, Dangote, Rabiu, and few others will take home should tell you where the emerging powers are: you may not believe this, only markets will liberate Nigeria, and the earlier everyone gets to that conversation, the better.
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Majority of our people are configured to see government as the messiah, so even when government is confused and incapacitated, we still expect some miracles from it.
But the reality is that governments or politicians don’t solve problem, rather they are specialists in creating problems.
We have a thriving telecom sector simply because government is not in charge, just look at all the sectors government manages and see the mess it created. Make security a private business in Nigeria today, and peace will return. We have higher budgets for public primary and secondary schools, compared to their private counterparts, but most people from middle-class upwards send their kids to private schools, same applies to hospitals, yet we refuse to learn.