 Still, the breakfast welcome and thanks for staying with us, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, recommends 26% of annual budget of developing nations through public education or to our educational sector. Now Nigeria's allocation to the sector is still less than 10%. President Mohammed Buhari had made promises at recent international forum that a location to education would be increased by at least 50% in the next few years and by 100% by 2025. Allocation to the sector in the 2022 budget estimate still fell short of stakeholders' expectation as it was pegged at 1.29 trillion nair or 7.9%. That was allocated to the education sector out of the 16.39 trillion appropriation bill presented to the National Assembly. Now the 555.3 trillion nair budgeted by the federal government in the last six years you only have 33.5 trillion nair as allocated to the educational sector and this represents less than 10%. In 2016, of the 6.06 trillion nair total budget, 369.6 billion nair or you like to say 6.7% was allocated to public education in the country. Now in 2017, 550 billion nair or 7.38% was allocated to education out of the 7.29 trillion budget we also have in 2018, 605.8 billion nair or 7.04% was given to education out of the 9.2 trillion that was in the budget. Moving to 2019, 620 billion or 7.05% was allocated to education out of 8.92 trillion nair while in 2020, 671.07 billion nair or 6.7% was given to education out of 10.33 trillion nair and in 2021, 742.5 billion or 5.6% was allocated to education out of the budget proposal of 13.6 trillion nair. We had already talked about 2022, let's have a bit of some comparison to what is obtainable in some parts of Africa. For instance in Ghana, you have Ghana allocating 23.81% of its national budget to education in 2015 and 22.09% in 2016, 20.1% in 2017, 18.6% in 2018. Although this is not Mita UNESCO's recommended 26%, is it better than less than 10% that we have in Nigeria? While in South Africa, the spin continues to increase allocation to the sector from the out to 46 billion to 16.7% in 2018 and in 2019, you could say that you had 307 billion run in 2020 that was also projected till it hits 416 billion run by 2023 and 2024. We have a guest joining the conversation this morning. It's a good thing that he's off the educational background. We're talking about Dr. Peter Ogundo, he's an educational researcher. Thank you, Dr. Peter for joining us. It's my pleasure to join you, good morning. So my question here is if education is a very important part of our lives and you have different countries, you know, you have nations devoting a huge part of their budget to the educational sector, what then is the problem? Why haven't we have such interests reflected in our budget in Nigeria? The open secret there is that the people who run their fairs of your country in Nigeria are people who are not training their own children here. And so they do not wear the shoe and they therefore do not know where it pinches. So since they are training all their children abroad, they do not care about how well we run the educational system. And so they prefer to put their money into things that are of importance to them. For example, security, they want to stay alive and keep wasting the money that is available to our national coffers. That having said that, we also have to recognize that most of these people are really illiterate, illiterate not in terms of not being able to read and write, but illiterate in terms of not appreciating and understanding the indispensable place of education in fast tracking development for a very poor country like Nigeria. And so so long as you continue to have these kinds of politicians who run their fairs of your country and then supported by their cronies, who populate the ministries of education without having a good background in education principles, then you continue to find yourself in a situation where they are not going to have adequate funding and the right human capacity to run the system. Unfortunately, that is where we are. And I think that we need to make an urgent effort to get out of this very unfortunate place. So one of the things that you mentioned is that, well, they are not in the know and so for them what's important is security. And if security is important, don't we understand why we're having the insecurity or the security situation that we have the challenges that we're faced with as a country at the time. Let's look at the out of school children. There are reports that about 18.5 million children are out of school. And we understand how this is a major threat to education. So how do you now say you're solving the issue of security and not understanding that if you take care of education, then security can also be handled? Yeah, that's the point I'm making. Elite trades are running their fairs of your country. They don't have brains that have been developed to understand how these things are interconnected. That if you fund education adequately, and of course, it's not just about funding. You also need to have the right people in the right places so that we can provide the right education. At the moment, we're not providing the right education. So people just learn the words of things and not the why of things. And until we're able to move our children to the why of things, they won't be able to think properly. And so when education is not properly provided, you discover that people go through the schooling system without getting educated. And they therefore lack the capacity to provide and save jobs. And even when you create the jobs and give them to do for you, they haven't got the knowledge and the skills to be able to do your jobs well. And so that's where we are. If you fix education, you have indirectly fixed security. You have indirectly fixed politics. You have indirectly fixed other social problems as well as the economy. But so long as you continue to make education take a backbench, for that long will you continue to have these other challenges that all of us are running about to try to fix. So the point I'm making overall is that we need to get the right people in the right places who can do the thinking. We haven't got think-as in government until we are able to get the right people in those kinds of climes and spaces who continue to have these challenges. OK, so let's continue to look at this because you have stakeholders saying that poor funding is responsible for the output that we have down. And over time, we've had stories that a lot of peasants were out on the streets who are not very employable. So we have constantly chunked out people who cannot be employed. That would mean that they don't have any value to add. But on the other hand, the argument also has been that we're not moving with the trend. Our curriculum might just be a problem, the kind of curriculum that we have. And also our ideology towards education, for instance, we seem to pay attention to conventional institutions rather than vocational. We know we have a vocational, but the number of vocational decisions that we have and that of the conventional universities, you know, you seem to have one on the other hand. So is the problem really just about poor funding or a curriculum or an ideology about education is also a problem? All of all of that, all of that as a matter of fact, I think that the funding matter shouldn't actually be our number one problem because we can fix that if we have the right people in the right places. We haven't got the right people in the education spaces, making policies and implementing the policies. That is the major problem because the politicians take their cronies and give them very significant positions in the ministries of education. And so those people haven't got the brain it takes to devise our proper policies that will guide us into where the money is because we don't really lack money the way we are thinking about it. But I do not understand why in the year 2021, we continue to believe that the average Nigerian parents will not be willing to pay for his child's education when the child is in the university, whereas almost everyone has the children in private schools and they pay a great inconvenience to keep their children in those places. Why should the child pay 100,000 per term while in primary school and get to university and is paying 25,000 Naira per term per semester? It doesn't make sense. So we have to get a model that works. The current model where the government picks up all the bills that run the education system at high education level is a very wrong model. We have to get to a point where we agree that Nigeria is a poor country and the government will not have control to have the capacity to fix all the problems in education funding-wise and then get parents to the table. In all of these conversations about us, I'm not aware that parents are part of the equation. They are not involved in the conversations that will lead us back to the classroom. And they are a very important element in this system. Unfortunately, they have been marginalized in the conversations that are going on. And until you are able to get them involved, because they will help you to fund the system, you will not be able to find a sustainable solution to the problems with the higher education system. You mentioned that you talked about the private institutions. So what exactly is the private sector doing? Because in Nigeria, if you have the means and you have what it takes, we seem to have a lot of persons ticketing towards the private universities. And so what exactly is the private universities or university or institution doing that the public sector is not doing and you have this great movement? Well, the challenge, as I said much earlier, is that the people running the system, especially as policy formulators and implementers in the ministries of education, are people who are either training their children abroad or have them in the private school system. And interestingly, the politicians and their cronies are also the people who own the private, you know, most of the private universities in the country. So as to strike benefits private universities, because it makes them more attractive compared to public universities, because every time you have this kind of strike, then all parents withdraw their children from public universities and move them to private sector to the private sector. But that is not going to help anyone because even the private universities in Nigeria are not providing the kind of education that parents are thinking is available in those places. Because who are actually the people teaching them in private universities? They are junk lecturers, essentially, from the public universities, universities like the University of Jaws, the University of Amadu, Bello, Sokka, Lagosibara. They are the ones who go to the private universities to go and teach, and they don't even want to take permanent jobs there because they don't want to, you know, be controlled by the missions and the private sector people who are in those kinds of places, because they want their academic freedom, which is very fundamental for good quality education to be provided at that level. So we are not deceiving ourselves. We haven't got it right. And the philosophy is not right. We don't know what we are doing as a people. We are unwilling to allow Nigerians who are even happy to self-forfeit to be able to help us to fix these problems because of our selfish interest which we are trying to protect in high places. And so, my sister, your problem is not about the end. Even if we get asked to throw this official fire coming from the president back into their classrooms, it is not going to provide us a lasting solution. And let me reveal this to you. By the time the strike is over and children return to their classrooms, they will discover that about 50 percent of their professors have left Nigeria because that's where we are. They are tired of this decrepit system and they are living in droves. And so we have to change ourselves. And we are going to pay lecturers for about five months without having got services from them. And that's very poor thinking. So every time we have this strike and we let lecturers stay away from their classrooms, we are bargaining for services not done that we are going to pay for. And this is what can come only from politicians who haven't got the right brains and who are not willing to let people who teach them what to do. Well, would you say that at this point now we need to get the right brains? Where do we get the right brains from in this space? We are only for the players. I trained in education. I studied up to PhD in England and in several other countries around the world. I was in Oxford. I was in Cambridge. I was in Norway. I was in Sweden. I was in Austria. They are Center for Innovation and Education. And there are several other Nigerians who have my kind of background. And we are willing to come home and stay here for a while to help to fix this place. But nobody is willing to give us the space to help Nigeria to move forward. And so, so long as you continue to ignore the people who know and you use illiterates to run the Nigeria education system for that long will you continue to live with the kind of problems that we are discussing this morning. So that's the thing. We have got the brains in diverse places around the world in the UK, in America, in Canada. The reason why we are not happy to come is because the politicians will not give you the freedom and liberty to use what you have acquired from Sena Climes to help to develop the Nigerians' higher education system. But if we repent suddenly and give Nigerians the opportunity who have the idea, the opportunity to run the system, you'll discover that these problems will disappear overnight. So we therefore have no right to blame those people who are moving their children, including those who are calling the shots. I mean, the elites now moving their children outside of the country, you know, because you mentioned that these are Sena Climes and it feels like it's better there, you know, to acquire an education rather than to be in this system. So we shouldn't blame them because the system is nothing to write home about. But quickly before you weigh in on that, I'd like to show your thoughts on this as well. Do you think that this is a very logic thing to do? Prior to now, this is 2022, in 2021, you had bills at different stages of legislative activities at the National Assembly for establishing 235, you know, federal universities, polytechnics and colleges of education and special institution. Now you said poor funding should not be an issue. But in the midst of the fact that we're not even able to fund the ones that we are, do you think that this is a smart move? Do you think that this is the best that we can do as a people? You don't have to be an educationist like me to understand that our problem is not the need to create more universities. We have enough. We have enough. We have enough universities that will accommodate everyone who has the intellectual capacity to benefit from university education. We don't need new universities to do that because in a modern society, actually, you don't have to always get up your pool in fiscal spaces to train them. In the UK, for example, opening a bus in the UK, you know, hundreds of thousands of students and who don't have to gather in fiscal spaces to learn. MIT is training hundreds of thousands, millions of people across the world without those who haven't traveled to America. So why do we keep thinking that we need fiscal spaces to give people good quality education in the year 2021? This conversation I'm having with you, we're not having it in a fiscal space. I mean, far away, you're in Victoria Island and people are able to participate in this and enjoy the conversation we're having. So why are the professors not able to work with politicians to recognize that the way forward is not to establish more universities, but rather to equip the ones that are in place and then use modern technology to take us to where we need to be? But I tell you one thing, politicians use the establishment of new universities as tools in their hands to convince voters to vote for them. Election is coming, it's around the corner and so they are going to tell voters at look in the past four years that I have been in office as your representative, I was able to get this university and this polytechnic into our community and so on that grant vote for me again. So that's the whole essence. It's not about giving people access, it's about using something to bag in for votes, which is very unfortunate for us. So the people here are not, the people who are in your country are not thinking at all. Country. Thank you so much, Dr. Peter Goudoro for being part of the show. You are Nigerian, except you're saying that it's only my country. You're here and we're all in this together. That's on a lighter note. Is there a country, some of us are beginning to get access from what politicians are doing. Sometimes we speak the way we do, but part of us are these cruisers. No, no, that's okay. And give us better control of us to get into it together. Yes, I mean, I wish we could continue this conversation. I really don't know how much of time that we do have waiting to get that prompted to leave, but let's see if we can have you share your thoughts one minute with the ongoing back and forth with ASU, the NLC and the federal government. NLC saying they are going to and back on a strike as a solidarity to the union, ASU, for them to implement the agreement that has entered. And the government is saying that the strike is illegal. On the other hand, the government is saying two weeks has been given for all of these issues to be resolved. We are saying you don't need two weeks. You need two days or three days to resolve the issue. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I agree with NLC, I agree with ASU. They have completed bargaining. It's just for the president to, the president shouldn't actually be talking to ASU. The president should be talking to the people who report to him. They should release the funds needed. They should provide the laboratory equipment. The ASU has my ASU, the ASU members are employees of government. So they have got nothing to do with how you fund the system. Where you work, is it your responsibility to look for money to make sure that the studio runs? Your business is to come into the studio and make this presentation. It hosts me for us to have a good conversation. So the president shouldn't be talking to ASU. The president should just direct ministry of finance to release the funds needed and then working in collaboration with Central Bank of Nigeria. All the funds are released and then by tomorrow, ASU wouldn't even need to go back to the negotiation table to get their members back to the classroom. So I completely agree with that. We don't need two weeks. We need only probably two to four hours to get their members informed that the government has done the needful and they should return to the classroom. But I must warn that if they return to the classroom in a hurry, the problem will come back to us because they haven't found a sustainable model for funding the university system. As I mentioned to you earlier, if you don't get the parents involved and the students who are benefiting from university education, if you don't get them involved in the equation, they are not going to have a sustainable model for funding Nigerian tertiary education sector. And that's very critical. For now, government officials, the politicians and those ministers of information, they don't seem to be looking in that direction. Everybody seems to be in a hurry to get ASU back to classrooms. That is not what we should be concerned about. We should be concerned about how to get a sustainable funding model for tertiary institutions in our country. Dr. Peter Ogudoro, thank you so much. I would like to speak with you again in regards to the educational sector of Niger. I appreciate your time. My pleasure. Have a great day. You too. Well, we've been speaking with an educational researcher. Dr. Peter Ogudoro, thank you so much. And like you have had, we hope that the relevant quarters will swing into action. We'll take a breakdown. We'll look at the role of public figures in nation building.