‘Education Is Key To Growth’, As Sen. Murray Bruce Gives Reasons And Advises Buhari
The Oasis Reporters
April 2, 2019
Senator Ben Murray – Bruce must have seriously pondered over the vast wealth in the US and the entire western hemisphere found in industry before dropping a forthright advice to President Muhammadu Buhari to fight phantom corruption less, but concentrate his attention on fighting illiteracy.
Senator Bruce noted the 10 richest U.S. tech entrepreneurs that are collectively worth nearly $600 billion.
Only education could have propelled the kind of amazing wealth or huge prosperity addition that is neither from Crude oil or commodity trading.
Take a look :
Jeff Bezos $145.6B
Bill Gates $100B
Mark Zuckerberg $63.7B
Larry Page $58.3B
Larry Ellison $57.8B
Sergey Brin $56.6B
Steve Ballmer $44.3B
Michael Dell $33.1B
Elon Musk $22.4B
Eric Schmidt $14B.
So he tweeted:
Dear President @MBuhari,
Invest in education, not just in anti corruption. Instead of throwing people in jail, remember that he who opens the doors of a school, closes the doors of prisons. It is sad that you have built not ONE school. Not even one. Yet you want crime to end?
— Ben Murray-Bruce (@benmurraybruce) March 31, 2019
At the back of the Senator’s must have been some of the obvious facts posited in an article by Maazi as the nation begins to jostle for who succeeds Buhari in 2023.
“When few days ago, Shettima Yerima, President of the Arewa Youth Consultative Forum, made the point in an interview, that the North will produce Buhari’s successor, he must have ruffled a few feathers in the South. But he spoke the truth as he saw it.
“Buhari’s administration has not really benefited the North because we are yet to see meaningful development. What most Northerners know is that they have a brother who is president, but that has not translated to anything meaningful to those down there”, reports Maazi.
What Yerima has not yet realised is that what the North needs is not a Northern president but a president that can govern competently, but more importantly, a system that works for the North and for the country. Buhari being president has not made the average Katsina person better than the average Northerner. Ogun people did not become the richest Yoruba because of Obasanjo. Bayelsa people have not become the richest South Southerners because of Jonathan.
Sentiment aside: Despite Buhari’s pro North tendencies, the average Northerner is not better off than he was under Jonathan. *And I dare say that Buhari’s anti market policies has hurt Lagos, and by extension, South West economy badly. So, while the South West has Vice President, it still prospered more under Jonathan because Jonathan promoted market economy which played to its strength.
*Overall, the average Nigerian is worse off under Buhari. This is so because Buhari is pushing policies that never worked, and cannot work. But of course, his supporters in their remarkable ignorance love to say it’s because there are no longer free money to dispense.*
Buhari, and indeed, the North seem to think that what will make the region prosper is to stay in power and to occupy all available space in government. But this is a lie and history has proven it to be so. During the oil boom years in the 70s, which coincided with the end of the civil war, at which period, Nigeria was firmly in the hands of the North – the region swam in oil wealth.
And to ensure it kept getting more than fair share of the wealth, it created more states and more local governments for itself and foresaw the drafting a constitution that made landmass, among others, criteria for revenue allocation. But ironically, the North still remained the poorest and the most educationally backward region in the country.
This is so, largely because the oil money had the lottery effect on the region. *Give free money to a man who has no idea how to make money, and he will end up in more misery than he ever was before.*
Access to oil money and government caused entitlement mentality to take root in the North and kill productivity. It is this same entitlement mentality that Buhari seems to be promoting. Unfortunately, no society can make progress when it is not productive. The reason Nigeria is in misery is that oil wealth killed productivity”.
The excessive focus on how the Buhari administration can enhance prosperity in the north, or how the Jonathan’s administration could have led to prosperity in the south south just as the expectations that the Obasanjo administration ought to have led to growth in the south west but did not can easily be avoided if the citizenry from North to South got the kind of up to the hilt education the US and the entire Western hemisphere gives to its people to be intellectually productive, leading to high tech enterprises which yield income beyond traditional means.
Therefore Ben Murray Bruce believes that what will enhance productivity is massive investment in education to give Nigerians tech giants whose wealth that is in individual hands, would dwarf Nigeria’s oil wealth.
“My point really is”, continues Maazi, “that Buhari’s approach to governance is the North’s problem, not the solution. This is the point Yerima seems to be making without realising it. And certainly, another fact that Yerima, and the North have not realised is that keeping power in the North is not the solution to the North’s challenges.
The only possible way they can realise it is to allow them to keep power. If, by the time another Northerner does eight years, and nothing changes in the region, perhaps, they would understand that the solution lies somewhere beyond a Northern president.
But of course, no president, whether from the North or South, can solve Nigeria’s and North’s problems without embarking on fundamental changes. I have maintained that the problem of Nigeria is largely structural. But until the North understands this to be true, structural changes cannot be made. A Southern president in 2023 will only give the North another southerner to blame for its problems.
