Nigeria’s economy is weak – CBN Deputy Governor

The Deputy Governor ( financial system stability), Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Dr. Kingsley Chinedu Moghalu has blamed most of the challenges facing the country on an ailing education sector.

Moghalu stated this on Saturday at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, UNN, in a lecture he delivered at the golden jubilee ceremony of the 1st graduates of the UNN.

In the lecture entitled “The Human Capital Dimension of Economic Transformation”, he observed that despite all endowments, both in the area of population and natural resources “Nigeria’s economic performance has been rather weak and does not reflect the country’s endowments”.

“About 50-70 percent of the population lives below the international poverty level of $1.25 in income.

“Other emerging economies, in particular Malaysia, South Korea, China and India were behind or at the same economic pace with Nigeria in terms of growth in industrial production in the 1960s and 1970s.

“These countries have transformed their economies and are not only far ahead of Nigeria, but are major players in the world economy today”, he added.

He continued that these countries had also recorded remarkable accretion in external reserves.

According to him, “Nigeria’s current external reserves stood at $45.67 billion as at September 26, 2013. The external reserves of China, Brazil and Malaysia were $3.5 trillion as at June 2013, $367 billion as at August 2013 and $144.34 billion as at July 2013, respectively”.

Moghalu stated that while a number of factors had accounted for Nigeria’s poor economic performance, “the declining quality of education and inadequate stock of human capital constitute key challenges”.

He identified access, student-teacher ratio, quality and funding as major problems plaguing the education sector in Nigeria, stressing that “the prioritization of access over quality in the quest to meet the Millenium Development Goals”, had equally eroded the quality of education in the country.

He added that “the tertiary education system is plagued by problems of quality, in particular weak learning infrastructure and low-quality teachers- the two factors that affect learning outcomes.

“Nigerian universities have lost their place in global rankings. No thanks to the myriad of problems, such as incessant strikes by university lecturers and students leading to prolonged closures.

“No single university in Nigeria was features in Times Higher Education 400 universities in the World rankings, yet there were representatives from South Africa and Egypt”.

As a way forward, Moghalu called for synergy between the three tiers of government, support from private sector, faith based organizations and other non-profit organizations.

In the area of funding, he said government needed to meet up with the UNESCO recommended minimum education funding of 26 percent of total national budgets.

Earlier in his address, the UNN Vice Chancellor, Prof. Bartho Okolo said his vision was to take the university to international standard on all aspects, especially the area of “teaching and learning environment, state of municipal and physical infrastructure, research and innovation, the competence of faculty and the abilities of our graduates”.

“I am happy, therefore, to report today that our university has continued to record unprecedented growth in all these major areas of quality assurance in higher education”.

The first graduates of the UNN were honoured at the event.