Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has called for more investment in
the people, describing it as more accurate perspective, reports ITRealms.
In his address at the 10th annual Bola Ahmed
Tinubu (BAT) Colloquium in Lagos, Thursday, the national leader of the All
Progressive Congress (APC), said despite the hurdles and difficulties that
come, “let this noble effort become our national reality for the sake of those amongst
us most in need, for the sake of the present generation and for the sake of generations
yet to come.”
Mis-investment, he said, comes with steep opportunity costs,
stressing that the misapplication of one naira means one naira less for a more
appropriate investment.
“In a way, this represents a double loss. Here I shall depart
from the mainstream approach that draws a line between capital investment and
what many people now call human capital investment.
“We now speak of the two as if they were conflicting opposites,
inherently at odds with each other.
“This is not a wise road to travel. Instead, we must think of them as points
along the same continuum. Instead of being opposites, they are in fact similar
and complementary, the one to the other,” he said.
Tinubu pointed out that human capital investment connotes
expenditures that improve the inner capacity or wellbeing of a person or
populace. Things such as education and health care come quickly to mind.
“Traditional capital investment connotes expenditure on
instrumentalities external to a person that improves his ability to further
improve his productivity or lifestyle. These are things like roads and power.
In between, he said, lie things like potable water which has
clear human capital as well as traditional capital investment dividends.
For Asiwaju, both forms of investment are related; both
ultimately benefit the people. No right-minded government builds a road but
forbids travelers its usage. Better roads lessen accidents, reduce travel time
and cut costs of business and goods.
Emphasising that electric power is not generated merely for
its own sake but so people can work more efficiently and live in greater
comfort.
“It allows students to read into the night, learning more and
learning better; it permits hospitals to utilize equipment and procedures that can
save thousands of lives otherwise lost,” he said.
In addition, he said, "It allow factories to hum 24 hours a day, producing jobs and
goods that increase the wealth and welfare of a people. Thus, investing in roads is more an investment in the people
who use them than an investment in the gravel and tar that comprise the paved
way.
Investment in power, Tinubu said, is at its "essence more an investment in
the people who will rely on it to improve their activities and efforts than it
is merely an investment in turbines and other physical equipment... Thus, our task is not to draw an artificial boundary between
the two types of investment.
"Our task must be to re-integrate these two components into a
coherent plan where finite resources are allocated in ways that respond to present
urgencies yet also answer the burning question of how to best achieve durable
economic growth for all segments of society.
"It is at this point that we must draw a different conceptual distinction
than the one normally drawn between physical capital and human capital investment. I posit that we profit more by drawing a conceptual distinction
between the type of social investment that helps us manage or mitigate poverty as
compared to that investment which leads to economic growth that reduces if not
eliminates poverty at its very root.
"Poverty mitigating investment may soften the harshest blows
of penury but such investment offers no great escape from it," he said, citing for an instance, that every human being has a right to health care. Giving such care is a moral duty of any compassionate government. Yet, however
healthy that person may become as a result, this does not mean his economic
situation will necessarily improve because of better health.
The same goes for education. We already have many intelligent
graduates whose abilities did not meet a job because there simply were no jobs
to meet.
Over the decades, we have built legions of people who are
well educated but not for this economy and this job market.
We must remember that education is not an abstraction. While
education is a virtue in itself, it also
must have practical utility or else it will become a discredited, even detested
thing.
A key purpose of education is to provide a person the skills required
to earn a living within the context of a given economic environment. There is
no pressing need to teach a desert nomad to scuba dive or to instruct a
fisherman in the Delta the intricacies of hunting a polar bear or riding a
camel.
Education must be wedded to the economy that now exists as
well as to the economy that shall be in the foreseeable future.
The able-bodied Africans who braved the harsh desert crossing
of the Sahara only to further brave the death waters of the Mediterranean Sea do
so not in search for better healthcare or even education for the most part.
They do so in search of meaningful work, the money, as well
as the sense of independent existence and self worth that such work can bring.
This is the compelling force.
Thus, any responsible government and society must heavily
invest in those things that promise economic prosperity and employment. This is
the primary challenge government must meet.
While government cannot ignore investments that lessen the
grimmest effects of poverty, we also must face the hard fact that a nation cannot
truly defeat poverty without generating broadly-shared economic growth through
prudent investment in infrastructure, industrial development, and agricultural
modernization.
My life has been dedicated to the proposition that Nigeria
can grow and overcome poverty, not just live with a less brutal version of poverty.
After 66 years, I am not about to change my walk or change my
talk at this point.
There is something we must examine more closely. The chorus of Western-appointed experts sings
that we must target certain levels of expenditure on various programs to reach
sustainable growth.
Few people dare question the veracity of this claim, the
soundness of this song. However, the question of cause and effect casts a long shadow
over the entire procession.
Is it true that sustaining certain levels of expenditures
will bring economic development?
Or is the deeper, more fundamental truth that economic
development will generate heightened levels of social expenditure?
Economic history points to the latter explanation as the most
viable road to durable national improvement.
We must define our path to development correctly if we are to
have any chance of following that path faithfully.
Yes, our society must invest sufficiently in lessening the
most brutal aspects of poverty. We cannot allow people to be broken by poverty
unattended.
However, the great escape from poverty comes not by making poverty
more livable. Our escape comes by burying poverty under an edifice of wealth
creation and equitable distribution of said wealth.
This is only done by economic growth. This is how England,
America and China did it.
As these nations represent the past, present and immediate future
of economic greatness, we should learn more from what they did for themselves than
from what they say we should do.
Here, I offer a few suggestions that may help blunt the
effects of poverty while ensuring sustained growth to increase our national
standard of living. We must:
1. Stimulate the economy by investment in new generation
technology and its resultant infrastructure. This must be at the heart of our national
infrastructure planning.
2. Encourage private sector investment in labor intensive
industries by reducing barriers to entry in these sectors and by helping such
enterprises to be cost competitive. This must be the core of our national
industrial plan.
3. Continue massive
investment in agricultural output and move to establish commodity boards and
commodity exchanges so that farmers will be assured of a livable income. Farm
mortgages should be more accessible to give farmers a pathway to credit to
procure better equipment and inputs.
4. Help the elderly.
We must continue to improve the pension system. This will reduce poverty among the elderly
while generating additional economic activity through enhanced consumer demand.
Moreover, this is the moral thing to do.
5. Reform the mortgage system to facilitate credit expansion
in a manner that allows the real estate sector to become a key driver of overall
economic growth and that opens the door to affordable housing throughout the
land.
6. Extend school feeding programs into all states.
7. Promote judicial reform to insulate jurists and the legal
system from corruption. Providing
attractive salaries and allowances will make jurists less susceptible to the corrupt
temptations and illicit requests that distort the cause of justice.
8. Create a blue ribbon panel that identify ways to eliminate
all forms of wrongful discrimination in our land. Every Nigerian must be seen
as a full and complete Nigerian in whatever part of the nation he may go, no matter
what part of the nation from which he came.
Our task is to define ourselves. That means we must think for
ourselves.
We are a populous, richly endowed nation. The growth of neighboring countries depends
on ours. We hold a responsibility greater than ourselves.
We must act with care. Prudence suggests that we learn our most
profound lessons from those nations that have already climbed the highest rungs
of the global economic ladder.
As such, this requires that we reject the artificial
difference between human capital and normal capital investment.
All investment, if used constructively, benefits the people and
thus can be called human capital investment.
As such, the term human capital investment really tells us
nothing of value when it comes to defining the correct path to optimal growth.
To forge that path, we must strike the correct balance
between investment that mitigates or temporarily relieves the worst of poverty
and that type of investment that sparks long-term economic growth that will
divorce the poor from poverty.
"For our goal is not to endure a less biting poverty. Our goal
is to enter into an era of robust prosperity.
This, my friends, my brothers and sisters, my compatriots is
the only way I know for our nation to invest in its people so that they may
become what God intended them to be.
Ayo Midele/GEE
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