We Don’t Need a School
People are hungry but you are here talking about school. “Who school help? No be person wey don chop go learn?” Some Nigerians still live below one dollar daily. There are over 300 schools in Nigeria producing thousands of graduates every year, and a larger fraction remaining unemployed. So what is the point of “the school”? Share us the money and let us help ourselves. Graduates are forced to learn one trade work or the other. Starting and running a business in Nigeria is very hard. In 2020, Nigeria was ranked 131st in the ease of doing business. This index is not even doing justice. 20k (about 20 USD) is not money in fact it’s useless in today’s economy but it is very hard to earn. “You will work your ass out. It is frustration upon frustration.” You will be managing yourself while another breaking news catches your attention. The price of fuel has increased again. You will be overly stressed by your client, another frustrated individual. Can you blame him or her? The country is really hard.
People don’t even say “come and eat” again. We are losing our culture due to bad economy. People are hungry. Share that money to the people, don’t build any school.
But sharing the money is not really the solution. In fact it will complicate things for us. We don’t need a school though. Sharing the money will bring about inflation. I will explain but I need to say this. Sharing the money to the people is like giving “the big men.” Even a JSS 1 student knows that the money will finish if it is shared. The people that this sharing idea will benefit are still the big men.
Inflation is bound to happen with this sharing idea. Because there is now more money in circulation, the prices of things will increase again. It’s simple economics.
What we need is a positive cash flow. Let’s invest the money. Let’s produce something with the money. Let’s farm with the money so that we will have more than enough to harvest. We don’t need a school. We need good jobs. Invest that money for us and create a good business environment for us. A good business environment is stable electricity not “the school”. It is competition not monopoly. It includes security and good roads.
Our wealth is under the ground. We need money to fetch it out. We need money to process and transport it. We need a good business environment for this to happen. After doing these things, we can now talk about building “the school” from the returns on our investments. Actually, we need to do something about the schools we already have before building another one. We need to upgrade our educational system. “Na person wey don chop go think.” We cannot cheat economics. We have to do things the proper way. Manipulated economics benefits only few people. We have to do things organically if we want to feed everyone. Our people are ready to learn, to work in fact we are knowledgeable but there are no opportunities.
We need money to make money. The country’s prosperity is below the ground. We need money to pull it out. We need a good business environment too. We need knowledge too. “If a farmer does not have the idea of bush fallowing, his prosperity will soon fade away.” We need to sustain our prosperity. We cannot be thinking like the way losers think. We need proper education and research. And our body needs care. We need proper healthcare. We need to fund our healthcare from the returns on our investments.
A good business environment is the work of the government. We need a regulatory body not a “manipulatory body”. “But na regulatory body dey manipulate.” We need to put the right policies in place. And we need to constantly re-evaluate our policies. People are hungry. Dead that idea of building a school. This is not the time, please!
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