Land of Plenty and Want

CONTINUED FROM LAST WEEK

The masses of Nigerian people are pathetically malnourished and disease-ridden, and wretchedly clad and housed. But the Nigerian farmers or peasants are more so. The annual output per farmer or agricultural worker is 40.2S. as against  177 per non- agricultural worker. Though there are no starisucal data on the point. it is a notorious fact that fanners who are mainly engaged in the production of export products like cocoa. groundnuts. ctc., are much more well off than those whose main occupation is the production of domestic roAt any rate It is estimated that only about 300,000 fanners are engaged in the production of cocoa. They cultivate an average of 5 acres each, and earn about £90 per head, i.e. more than double the average for all the 20 million Nigerian fanners. The picture isthe same among those engaged in non-agricultural occupations. A top Civil Servant earns, all told, as much as £4,000 per annum, as against the daily paid male worker who earns only £90 in a whole year.

The comparable figures for Britain are approximately £1,000 per annum for a male manual worker – the equivalent of Nigeria ‘s daily paid worker, and £9,200 for the best paid Civil Servant. In other words, whilst the daily paid manual worker earns 1I44th of what is paid to the best paid Civil Servant in Nigeria, his counterpart in Britain earns as much as 1I9th of what is paid to the Secretary to the Cabinet who is the highest paid Civil Servant in Britain, It is easy to infer that, as between the Nigerian peasant engaged in subsistence farming on the one hand, and the Nigerian merchant, business executive, or entrepreneur on the other, the gap must be much wider.

Tax evasion is a chronic and widespread disease in Nigeria, It is. more so among those (other than salary earners) who are assessed to personal income tax than amongst those who, because of their obvious poverty, are presumed to have an income of between £ 1 and £50, and are, therefore, called upon to pay only a Poll Tax or what is popularly known as Flat Rate Tax. In the published figures of the Western State, which is, comparatively, the most progressive and most developed State in Nigeria, about 21 0 people declare an income of over £300 each, whilst about 600,000 are each presumed to be within the £ I – £50 income range, Even if the number of tax payers in each income bracket is doubled to make up for tax evasions, the result for our present purpose is the same. The gap between the poor mass of the people and the rich few is very wide, and is already generating: growing and bitter disaffection between the two classes.

In 1963 when we gave ourselves a population of 55.6 millions, we had only a total of563 medical practitioners including specialists, and a total of 25,794 hospital beds, giving us respectively a ratio of approximately I medical practitioner to a population of 100,000, and 1 hospital bed to a population of 2.000q. The present official ratio of I medical practitioner to a population of 50,000 is erroneous and misleading; because it does not take the existing estimated population, which has been growing at the rate of 3(% since 1963, into account. In Britain, by comparison, there are 35,000 medical practitioners including specialists and 464,000 hospital beds, to a population of 54 millions. The ratio is 1 medical practitioner to a population of 1,540, and hospital bed to a population of 116. It would be invidious to compare the qualities of medical practitioners and hospital beds in Nigeria and Britain.

Altogether, only 3 million of our children are receiving instruction in 15,000 primary schools. Of these 3 millions, only half-a-million are receiving instruction in the Northern Region, which is 53.5% of the entire population of Nigeria. There are 160,000 pupils in our secondary schools, 6,700 in our vocational schools, 3,200 full-time and part-time students in our technical institutes and colleges, and 10,000 students in our universities. Comparable figures for Britain are 9 millions in primary schools, 2.8 millions in secondary schools, 2 million full-time and part- time students in vocational, technical, and technological institutes, and 167,000 full-time students in British universities.

Our backwardness in the field of education is aggravated by the fact that we are short of teaching personnel at all levels. There is a shortage of 4,550 graduates and of 5,182 intermediate-level teachers, in our post-primary and teacher training institutions. Even at our present slow rate of economic growth, year in year out, we trail very far behind our high-level manpower needs, both of the senior and intermediate categories. We are very short of everything: doctors, engineers, accountants, economists, managerial and administrative staff, etc., etc. We have already given the figures showing our shortage of high-level manpower in the teaching profession; another example relating to agriculture will suffice ..

The F.A.O. records a shortage of about 1,000 graduates in agricultural faculties ‘for adequate staffing of essential government services for agriculture’. According to the same authority, the immediate needs of agriculture are to expand total capacity for agriculture and veterinary students in our universities to 1,550 by 1967/68. In fact. the number of students in agricultural faculties in manpower in certain parts of the country, caused by the current civil war, the position, in the near future, is going to be much worse.

Excessive waste of resources, due to injudicious investment arising from lack of technical and managerial competence on the part of Nigerian private businessmen, abound everywhere. With very few exceptions, Nigeria’s public corporations are veritable hotbeds of criminal waste of natural and human resources. This is due mainly to fraud, corruption, and unspeakable inefficiency on the part of the Nigerians and, sometimes, non-Nigerians, who manage these corporations.

CONTINUES NEXT WEEK

YOU SHOULD NOT MISS THESE FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE

Revealed! Details Of South-West APC Leaders Meeting With Presidential Aspirants

US: Three dead in Iowa church shooting following Biden gun speech

MORE revelations have emerged about Friday’s meeting held by South-West leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) with aspirants from the zone, whose main objective, was on how to avert a crisis that will create a fractured party as it prepares for primary on May 30 and 31, Sunday Tribune has reliably gathered…

Supreme Court Has Cleared Civil Servants To Participate In Politics, Falana Tells FG

NIGERIAN workers are constitutionally-free to participate in politics, lawyer, Mr Femi Falana has said. He was responding to the warning from the central government to civil servants to stay off politics…

Battle For New Alaafin Begins As Ruling Houses Insist On Producing Next Oba

US: Three dead in Iowa church shooting following Biden gun speech