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THE huge and intolerable cost of Nigeria’s largely ineffective but overbloated bureaucracy should naturally spur official rethinking of the concept of creating governmental outfits with overlapping functions to combat a problem. The tendency is to create a new agency when the existing ones designed to solve a problem are not producing the desired results. Rather than interrogating the circumstances surrounding the failure of the existing structures to deliver the goods or tweaking them to serve the purpose of their creation, recourse is often made to the creation of fresh agencies. There must be an end to less than creative, lazy and lackadaisical approach to governance. A strategy that focuses on creating new bureaucracy with a view to throwing money, that is not even available, at every problem must stop.
The bill for a new agency for almajiri and out-of-school children which is currently receiving legislative attention in the House of Representatives is a perfect example of the avoidable penchant for profligacy in government, and it must be discouraged. The proposal is titled ‘Bill for an Act to Establish National Commission for Almajiri Education and Out of School Children to Provide for a Multimodal System of Education to Tackle the Menace of Illiteracy, Develop Skill Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Programmes, Prevent Youth Poverty, Delinquency and Destitution in Nigeria.’ The proposal seems fascinating and compelling by its seemingly comprehensive diagnosis of the out-of-school children and almajiri issues that require official attention. However, it is an avoidable duplication of federal efforts at tackling the identified challenges. It is ridiculous and unmerited.
The question may be asked as to what the job of the state governments is? For instance, the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) law 2004 makes it mandatory for Nigerian children to be educated up to junior secondary school. Till date, the Federal Government is still providing budgetarily for UBEC, but many state governments have failed to access the funds because they are not ready to pay the required counterpart funding. This bill is clearly ill-conceived and ill-timed and perhaps has a tinge of ulterior motives considering the burgeoning national consensus that the government at the centre is too unwieldy and that there should be devolution of power and responsibilities to the subnational governments. Why should the legislature be contemplating the expansion of the federal bureaucracy when its extant size is not even being adequately resourced owing to paucity of funds? Or have the lawmakers failed to realise that something is fundamentally wrong with the subsisting practice whereby a significant portion of the federal recurrent expenditure is being financed with borrowed funds?
Is that practice sustainable? Why should the legislature, an arm of government that should be keen on checking the excesses of the executive, be the one trying to compound its financial woes by proposing a new resource-guzzling agency that may end up being ineffective like its predecessors? Will it not be more effective and even efficient to tackle the almajiri issues by latching onto the instrumentality of the extant UBEC law? There is already in place the Universal Basic Education (UBE) programme which the Federal Government funds to ensure basic education for all Nigerian children. Just why would it be difficult for states to take advantage of this to help the almajiri and out-of-school children they have? Except there are other selfish and ignoble motives, there is nothing to be gained in throwing another national agency at the problem of almajiri and out-of school children when each state could easily work out how to handle the situation at their level with the support of the Federal Government. The proposed new agency is superfluous; no serious government creates a new agency to address every challenge.
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Also, it would be insensitive to gloss over the fact that the challenges to be tackled by the new agency are rather sectional, while the resources for its funding will be drawn from a common purse. It is no wonder, and it is not out of place in a plural setting, that while the agency is yet inchoate, it is already being seen in many quarters as a ploy to divert funds to a section of the country. It will be recalled that former President Goodluck Jonathan’s government built almajiri schools but most of the beneficiary state governments left them to rot. Why should the Federal Government continue to shoulder the responsibilities that ought to be taken up by state governments? We strongly urge the House of Representatives to step down the consideration of this bill because it is unnecessary. The ministries of education in the affected states are encouraged to forge a working relationship with the Federal Ministry of Education and various development commissions such as the North East Development Commission as well as interested Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) to work out a comprehensive solution under the extant structures to return out-of-school children to the classrooms and take the almajiri off the streets.
The country already has more than enough agencies and structures to act on identifiable problems. What is required is to make existing agencies to deliver on their mandate rather than creating more ill-performing agencies.
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