Nigeria Paying the Price of Poor Management
Money Palaver
By George Eze Emeghara
Poor management is the root of all our country’s problems. The people who run this country have failed to acknowledge or understand that at the end of the day everything is connected. Linked.
For instance the refusal to fund education leads to strikes by the lecturers’ association.
Strikes by the lecturers lead to a mass exodus of students to schools abroad.
The number of student visas issued by Britain jumped from about eight thousand to over fifty thousand in the past couple of years while Nigerians reportedly paid 1.7 billion pounds in scarce foreign exchange to British schools.
That is Britain alone. There are Nigerians studying in virtually every country of the world. Most of them are being supported with funds from home.
If the schools here were open and working as they should, a huge chunk of that money would have been retained here.
Let us not talk of the humongous amounts being expended on importing refined petroleum products because we have zero refining capacity. Instead of repairing or even building a new refinery, or two, we have been waiting for an entrepreneur, Dangote to complete his own.
Some of the money the country borrowed and spent building rail roads, some going to nowhere of importance to most Nigerians, for trains which people no longer patronise because of insecurity, could have been used to improve our refineries. The money saved by fixing the refineries would then have been used to build railways and other infrastructure.
What did the prolonged border closure achieve apart from driving up the prices of certain commodities like rice and putting many Nigerian companies involved in cross border trade in difficulty or out of business altogether?
In virtually every sector, the ravages of consequences of poor management are glaring. One could go on and on, for the examples are numerous but there is no point in doing so.
The fact is that the country could be better managed. Better run. For the benefit of its citizens.