 Back here, education. I mean, as Mr. Peter will be saying all the time, if we're going to make progress, two fields cannot be overlooked. Education, health care. Now, we've spoken to the challenge of education on several occasions. What we know for a fact is that what you get out is what you put into it. I want to talk through issues in education, layers of them, but we don't have the time. I'd just like to come in with Dr. Ombiageli as the questioner. And to ask my dear sister, Obi, to lay out for us what the big problems are in education in Nigeria. She's had a role as Minister of Education, and we've spoken to this subject several times in our conversations. So in a quick couple of minutes, if Obi sets us going off, then my colleagues here in the studio will chip in for us to make sense of where policy is and where we must be going if we are to reap demographic dividend in this country. Obi. I had to tear myself out of the meeting on the funeral activities for Chief of Basilica Meche, the legendary one who was one of our front row nationalists, first Minister of Aviation in the First Republic. And I just wanted to respond quickly to this and get back to the session with them. On education, I think the very strong, I'm unable to use my video unfortunately, so please bear with me. You would have to make do with my audio. Is that okay, Pat? Okay, yes, sure. Yes, okay. On education, I think that we have enough analytical evidence of how important it is for economic development. The case is made that education has gone beyond being a social good to being not just a social good, but also an economic imperative for the growth of any society. As a matter of fact, as more research advanced, we came to the conclusion that the real reason that human capital is important is because as we advance in knowledge through technology, the contribution of education to growth just continues to be more accentuated. To that extent, therefore, for a continent that we see a reversal of its economic performance to its growth, to its natural endowment, we can clearly come to the conclusion that the lack of emphasis on economic or the lack of emphasis on the power of economic growth by human capital explains our story. The more natural resources we have found on our continent, the less the economic performance of our continent. And so anyone who thinks that an additional discovery of one commodity of the other would be the basis of our economic growth has not been paying attention to the analysis that show clearly that we are stuck in the low equilibrium growth that comes from a very perverse behavior of the politics of the continent because of the contestation for minerals and the resources that come, the process of those resources. To that extent, therefore, we can conclude that those who want to continue the old paradigm of emphasis on natural resources don't have a new set of ideas with which to work. I believe very much in the power of education, and I've seen the contribution that education has made. Sorry, Obi, let me interfere here and stay in line with what you're saying. One university in California, Stanford, is probably responsible for more capital than the capital available in the entire continent of Africa. And all they have done is create some human capital, some of who just went across the road literally into Silicon Valley and created companies, which in a very short period of time, while they were still in their 20s, made them holders of billions and billions and billions of dollars in capital. Yet, if you look at education budgets in Nigeria, it is almost ridiculous that we don't seem to understand the game the world is playing in terms of our investment in education. And even that education which we are given, and I go back to Paulo Freire and the pedagogy of the oppressed in nature of the piggy bank mindset in which we are still using colonial type understanding of education. What must we do in terms of budgeting or freedom of the system? And I say this particularly because sitting here with me is Emmanuel Orgi who leads a group called AFED, a station of formidable education development in Nigeria. AFED is one of the local schools in like blighted neighborhoods and all of that, who educate more of our children than government schools. So some thinking about private investment in education is critical. So in terms of general strategy and budget, how should we approach in education? So the first thing you must not do is to assume that the most critical problem to solve in education is to give it more money. I know for a fact that the more money that however incremental it was over the decades that we gave to education, the less the learning outcomes in education. And every education system has to be about the learning outcomes. If you have all the children in school but they really are not learning, we have wasted investment in education and we have actually blighted the future of our children even more. So what must we do? We must look at the issue of funding education from the perspective of how it correlates to performance in education and we use the word rightly investment which is entirely different from budget. Investment in education means that you must be evidence-based in investing in the things that have a higher probability of influencing learning outcomes. And it therefore means that you need a lot of research and a lot of data around what works, what interventions improve learning outcomes and where in the chain of what we call education as a system and education as a sector, education as a process. All of these are very different things. So education as a system, what we have found through research is that the foundational literacy and numeracy skills which really start off children very well in life. Just the basic six foundational skills. The skills of literacy and numeracy, they are the age of 10. You would be shocked that nine out of every 10 African children are not acquiring minimum proficiency in literacy and numeracy in our continent. The rest of the world, the number is something of seven out of 10 in the middle income countries. It's an average of five to six out of 10. In high income countries it's one out of 10 not achieving. So you can see that we are stuck in a very bad situation. We must first therefore correct everything that would support a solid foundation for the children because it's a predictor of lifelong capacity to learn and therefore capacity to earn. So what must we do there? We must invest in the things that research has shown to influence learning outcomes for children. So structured pedagogy is an important aspect of it. What does this mean? Some basic things of making sure that the curriculum as well as learning plans as well as the coaching, the training and the coaching of the teachers, as well as textbooks that children use at that foundational level, enable them to grasp the science of learning. And so just correcting the foundation can lay a stage for what would happen with secondary education and for what would happen with tertiary education and other forms of informal adult education. And then we can see clearly that the further investment in education has to go from the perspective of identifying who best can pay for education. At the foundational literacy level, there is absolutely no reason why we should, as a state, live that to the vagaries of the market. What we should really do is that those who have the capacity to pay and would love to give their children the kind of education that is prized, let them go ahead and do so. But we must not live the poor with failing public institutions. Today, what we also know about research in early childhood, sorry, in foundational literacy is that what we call nursery schools, which have been the preserve of the middle class of Africa to the outer neglect of the children of the poor, is so important because at the year of three, between two and three, that's when the learning capacity is unlocked for a child. In the case of the poor, which constitute more than 65% of the children that we have in public schools, that we have in the country stuck in public schools, these children at that age are in markets or on the work sites with their parents or at home drinking ogi, drinking akamu, and that even worsens their fate in life because it certifies their capacity to learn. So it means that early child care education has to be very high on the agenda of any serious government that wants to tackle the issues of inequality that immediately start in the lives of people through the lack of access to quality education. You bring up some things that are very important there, and I think it's important we engage it. Just to make a point, many, many years ago, back in the Babangila days, the friend of mine, late Hashim, Abu Bakar Hashim, was palm-sikking education, and I stopped by to see him one evening, and I was complaining bitterly about allocation to education, and he said to me, look, the one that is allocated, his staff just used it to organize conferences and print bags and make... There you go. And I said to him, yes, but you are a leader, that is your business to check, because they brought this point of early childhood education. We need to massively invest in retraining teachers of entry level kids, those two, three-year-olds, where the foundation is laid. But the politics of Nigeria make us focus so much on ASU and university education, and we miss the foundational level, which is where it matters the most. What can we do? But you know Pat, you know Pat, that when you look at the dynamics of power, it goes in the direction of the middle income class on our continent, and we have an utterly selfish middle class. The middle class is the educated class, so they have voice, and because they have voice, they have much more political power, and therefore they can determine what is the agenda setting of government in many ways. So you see the middle class of Africa, they would pay the best kind of money to give your children what you call it, mastery education, that is early childhood education, give them foundational education in a junior secondary and secondary, but as soon as it gets to university education, they want the government to pick up the cost of that education, and so in that way what they then do is that they hold the government hostage to whatever it is that they want, and so the priority for them is tertiary education, therefore the priority of government becomes tertiary education, because it's emotionally, what do you call it, what's the word that we use for it? It's emotionally engaging or self-serving kind of conversation between the government and the middle class. Now this is unfair because it means that we don't have constituency for basic education, the foundational education, and so we must break that. The government must be the people that have the care for the majority of the people in the land who are in poverty, and they must concentrate very much in saying how we can fix foundational literacy, we need to get early childhood education, junior secondary education, senior secondary education as much as possible are working, and then we can have this discussion around the tertiary education from the perspective of what we know, that when people get tertiary education, the economic benefit of tertiary education, a lot of it packs into the pocket of the beneficiary of tertiary education, and that to that extent therefore we must allocate the kind of cost for funding that kind of education in a way that ensures that the benefits are understood and that the financing ties into how the cost allocation goes. Let me end on this note, but you see if we want education to unlock our economic growth, we do need to be much more data driven, we do need to understand what the barriers to our economic growth in different sectors of the economy are, and we do need to design our relevance and quality of curriculum, especially at the level of the skills development from that orientation. When I've seen what you said about your permanent secretary friend layout, I've often said to them that as Minister of Education, I had to use an analytical process to understand what had happened to budgets of Ministry of Education in the past, and I said to my colleagues in the Ministry of Education at that time, why that sector of education? As we looked at the inverse relationship between budget and performance, I said to them, is this the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Works? Because there was much more interest in transaction related activities in education than there was any interest in the policy dimensions of education on the regulatory issues, quality assurance issues in the investment in professional teachers development, and the coaching that is absolutely necessary on the investment in technology that was necessary because as the world began to progress, it was important that instructional materials would reflect that level of awareness and knowledge of the world. Now what I said to them then, which was from today, is that if you fund a dysfunction well, okay, what you would have is a well-funded dysfunctionality. You don't simply say to yourself, ah, education needs money. Let's give it more budget. You give it 22% budget. You know that 22% budget will fund your dysfunction. Well, it's a well-funded dysfunction. What you need is an education system that works. It therefore requires that you should do what we call prior actions. Your prior actions are bold and courageous reforms in the governance of education, in the issue of teachers, in the issue of your curriculum, on the issue of your instructional methods and all that is associated with it, on issues of equity in education, on issues of the role of technology in education, on the issues of the reform of the policy environment for education. So there are just some, and then of course, there is a salient issue on the, on the matter of finance in education. And this is a conversation that we've been running from. We have to have the conversation on how we finance education. Countries of, you know, more advanced economies are even forced to have that conversation. Yes, absolutely. They keep going back to the table to look at it all over again and to figure out how to ensure that everyone who is not educated at the foundational level has quality education at that level, regardless of what their station in life might be. And then when it comes to tertiary education, there has to be a conversation on how to allocate risk and benefits, right? Benefits and all of that. So I would like to thank you for the opportunity of, you know, giving my few thoughts to this. Thank you, Pat. Thank you so much, Obi. Yes, thank you. I will let you get back to that meeting. But the issue that you have laid down, we will crack up in the next 10 minutes before we go to the next segment as our time is almost running out. But I'd like for us to pick up on the business of funding education. Who should be funding education? What? I mean, very important is the point made about tertiary education. I've tried to do that. Sometimes you'll be misunderstood. So much obsession with tertiary education, university education, is it being funded well? You know, government must fund it. People will argue. No, no, no, no, no. But it is this elite conspiracy that leads us there. We miss the most important stage in education, which is that early childhood education. Who should be funding education? How should we spread the cost? I mean, the average, you know, one clear example, you here have been a professor in the United States for such a long time, and you can relate to this. I tell my friends who are practicing in the United States, doctors, many of them were educated in Nigerian universities. They are colleagues who they are working with in the U.S., basically are paying for getting that medical education many, many years after they leave medical school. These Nigerian colleagues basically got free education in Nigeria and moved to the United States with that education and all of that, which shows elite conspiracy around tertiary education. It's not a conversation Asu likes, but tertiary education, people should pay more for it because they use it more for themselves than for society. Where it is more important that base level, where that education for everybody builds up society, they don't ask for its funding. I say you get this ridiculous thing. We are a person pays two, three million Naira, a term for the child to go to private school, primary level, and wants university education to be free. How did we get to this absurdity? And how can we begin to restructure education funding in Nigeria? I think first of all, obviously it all in terms of the foundation for education. I think they're coming directly to your question. Yes, in the United States, remember again that education is one of the drive engines that grows every economy. They're not about it. So for example, when you talk about this funding, I think what we have right now in DbDati about how are we going to be able to fund that particular area is the issue and the fundamentals that we will no longer, for example, make the government pay everything that we're going to come out alone, alone package. We have by for example, between 10 and 20 years, people can be able to pay back this money because if they give it free, people take it away free and they don't have anything to do with it. So the best thing right now is to make sure after that, remember again that we're talking about free education for primary and secondary. And then they go in back, for example, the tertiary one. So the tertiary one, for example, should be a package whereby, for example, people don't have that particular resources, can be able to have a bank. DbDati is planning to come out with a banking system whereby people can be able to have opportunity to have loans where they can be able to pay about a 20-year period. So that with that, gives the people opportunity to be able to enhance that particular education policy they have. And that's one of the key issues here. And one of the issues in funding education is that this make believe that most of the children of the poor go to poorly managed government schools, which is a big lie because most of the children of the very poor actually, the poor spend more on education of their children than they reach do. As a percentage of their income. It's not coming free from any government schools. The statistics on how many children in Lagos of the very poor go to private schools can be given to us by Emmanuel Oji, who is president of AFED, or chair, right? Of AFED. And AFED is low-cost primary schools, private enterprise in poor neighborhoods, if you will, around which a lot of work has been done. I have been associated with this process. I'm actually a patron of AFED, national patron. And I was interestingly brought into this process by an Englishman, James Tully, Professor Tully, who is Vice Chancellor of Buckingham University. He used to be an University of Newcastle and has done a lot of work on these schools in several countries around the world, low-cost private schools. So Emmanuel, what is the kind of percentage of people who go to school in Lagos go to AFED-type schools? Yes sir. Good evening, Nigeria, and those of you who know us from the diaspora. Prof, thank you for this opportunity. Let me say clearly we've been on this debate for a long period. Like I was discussing with Prof earlier, I said we are on the group that disagree with the figure of 20 million out-of-school children. Because a majority of our kind of school are not in the government rather. And on that note, the number of children who attend this kind of school are not accounted for. So they are considered as out-of-school children. So if you come to Lagos, for instance, I think the statistics around 2007 conducted by Professor James Tully himself revealed at that time when they were saying that about 45 percent of the children that are out-of-school in Lagos, after the research work, it shows that they were just about 4 percent. And not as if that 4 percent were real. It is just that in order to give it to, not to leave anything to chance, because when he went into these schools, local schools, he found these children learning. And of course, further to that, they conducted a test that showed that the children in these low-cost private schools were learning better than their counterpart in the public school. So, frankly, as of the last time we were talking about close to a million children in Lagos alone. I'm not talking about across the nation. I can tell you, I had the privilege of visiting many of these schools, including those on Kerouz in Makoko. And all of that. I think Emmanuel was in some of the entourage of my visit to this place. And I felt totally ashamed of myself. And as much as I thought I was a great policy activist and everything, it took somebody coming from England to come and expose me to what was going on in my backyard. But you know what government agencies spend most of their time doing? Trying to shut them down, finding all kinds of, whereas they are the major providers of education to the children of the poor. And that your driver pays 5000 Naira a month from the 30,000 Naira that you pay him for that child to go to one of these schools. So, policy needs to address this. How do we, and this is the most important stage of education, how do we provide supplement, if you want to call it that, to strengthen these schools and show that that driver can send their child to this school in a better shape so that that early stage is taken care of, rather than fighting over how many billions more should we give to the university system? And I think this is a major debate that we should face in this country. I think that basically what Abid just mentioned now, that we need to sit down and then use data. Because we have a very selfish middle class. Yes, middle class. Very, very selfish. Very selfish middle class. And then come to the table, whereby, for example, we should be able to find out how do we fund it? That funding education is very, very important. I was just looking at educational growth in Nigeria, last, you know, first war. Education was on the top, on the bottom of the list, 1.4%. Which means underfunded. To blame for funded. But we look at the inflation rate of education, 15%. Which means that there's a big gap between funding. So, this is the reason why the Obidati says we need to come to table. And then bring in people that actually knows what happens in the field. And be able to discuss how can we be able to fund education. It's not talking about doing this in the first 200 days. It's not about doing this in the first 100 days, so that we can come to the table and be able to solve this problem. So, such fundamental value, where education is available. Unfortunately, time is out and we have to move on to several other segments, waiting for us to go to talk about uniting Nigeria. And how this takes us forward. So, let's take a break. Go back to the amazing, very, very amazing, and then we'll come right back and say goodbye. Thank you.