Out of the many campaign promises made by the President
during the 2015 elections, one of them has become a thorn in his flesh. The
promise to pay 25million unemployed graduates an allowance of N5,000 monthly
has been on the radar ever since President Mohamadu Buhari won the elections.
Some people, including the PDP, have consistently said that
this was an election promise that was never going to be kept. Others wondered
where the money to pay this allowance will come from considering the fact that
the economy of the country is at its lowest ebb since independence.
Despite all of these comments and noises, the former
Publicity Secretary of the APC, now Minister of Information and communication,
Alhaji Lai Mohammed has consistently maintained the determination of the
Federal Government to pay this money.
While I am all for anything that will make life a little
less difficult for the unemployed or the vulnerable, other questions are at the
same time bothering my mind. The first is, how do we validate the actual number
of people who should be paid? The Government says unemployed graduates; so this
means that you must have gone through any institution of higher learning. Why
do we exclude those who went to technical colleges or only have just finished secondary
school education? Unemployment is unemployment, even if the guy did not attend
any kind of school.
The next thing is how do we find out if they are working or
not. How do we determine if someone is working, if he says he is not? Then we also have to contend with working out
from which generation of unemployed graduates we are going to start from. What about
those who had worked previously, but are now out of a job? Are we going to
consider them too?
These are valid questions, but I suppose those who made the
promises would also have considered these questions, and I am sure that they
are smart enough to have figured out a way to do it. However, the one thing
that makes me a bit concerned beyond the logistics of paying the money is the
mathematics or even the economics of it.
Let’s start this way. N5000 naira monthly for 25million
persons will come to roughly around 125 billion naira monthly, which comes to
1.5 trillion naira yearly.
At 125 billion naira monthly, this sum is more than the
annual budgets of many states in the federation. Only Rivers, Lagos, Bayelsa
and perhaps a few others have annual budgets that is more than this figure.
At 1.5 trillion naira yearly, this sum is about 33% of our
annual budget as a nation, excluding for 2016 where we are spending more than 8
trillion naira. Thus if you look at it, this sum is huge.
Now let’s talk about what 5,000 naira can do for an unemployed
youth. At best, it will starve off serious hunger. At 200 naira per meal, the
guy will only be able to eat once a day for about 25 days, meaning that this
money will note even last him the month on feeding alone if he stretches his
meal to once a day.
He cannot recharge his phone, buy soap, toothpaste, or other
toiletries. He cannot do a lot of things with 5,000 and we are still talking
about necessities here.
If we look at the total sum, 125 billion naira monthly
poured into capital projects in roads, rail, power, or in agriculture will
significantly change the face of our economy. By the time we spend 1.5 trillion
additional monies in one year to provide the much needed upgrade to the
infrastructure in the power sector alone, the majority of these unemployed
people or even vulnerable will no longer be unemployed or vulnerable.
I think if the government goes along with this charade, it
will only be playing to the gallery, and this will be a gross misuse of public
funds. If this fund is however poured into projects or services (like improvement
of our health infrastructure, or into national health insurance schemes), we
will have solved huge problems for not only the unemployed and vulnerable, but
for the entire nation.
Instead of burying their heads in the sand, the party and
the administration needs to reverse this agenda, and use the money more wisely.
There is no shame in admitting your errors and reversing the decision. A stitch
in time saves nine.
* This article also appeared as a feature on www.ph-microscope.com
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