Wednesday 24 June 2015
Ahmed Adamu met with David Becham
Dr. Ahmed Adamu, the Chairperson of the Commonwealth Youth Council met with the popular football star, David Becham at the Queen's Palace (Buckingham Palace) in London, during the presentation of awards to the Queen's Young Leaders.
Tuesday 23 June 2015
Is Lamido Sanusi wasting away in Kano?
By Dr. Ahmed Adamu
 |
| Emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi |
His name is Sarki Sanusi Lamido Sanusi. He saved 24 commercial banks in Nigeria that were on the brink of collapse. You won’t be wrong if you say he is perceived as the most courageous public servant who took mustered the courage to expose what many reckoned as excessive corruption and financial mismanagement against the government of his time. His bravery and boldness came with a stiff price that caused his suspension from office, not knowing that truth will pay him even more few months after.
As the Nigerian central bank governor, his policies were against the extreme capitalists who accumulated illegal wealth at the expense of the poor. He was the people’s bank governor, and ensured softer banking policies for the masses and guaranteed their deposits. He sacked powerful bank managing directors and charged them for their corrupt practices, a move that many termed “Sanusi Thunami”. The introducer of the cashless economy and an orator and mentor to the young people.
He was the first from northern Nigeria to become the MD of the First Bank Plc, one of the biggest financial institutions in Africa. A renown economist with 30 years of banking experience, he is also a development economist and practitioner. In his anti-corruption campaign, he opposed the Nigerian petroleum subsidy regime that subsidises corruption. He is the emir of the second ranking royal kingdom in northern Nigeria. He once asked his followers to revenge on attacks by Boko Haram militant group, a call that led to an attack on his mosque killing more than 150 of his people.
Having briefly described who Sanusi Lamido Sanusi is, who I would rather call SLS, one would believe that such a person is a national resource that any country will long to have. I do not see a better time when Nigeria needed the services of SLS again than now. A time when the historical democratic revolution became possible in Nigeria, a time when the long awaited change arrived, a time when the masses look up with high hope and optimism into the future, and a time when the country is yearning for seasoned technocrats to actualise the real change.
Unequivocally, this is not the time for trial and error in some sensitive government positions, it is not time for political compensations.
It is time to build a new Nigeria; the tested and trusted ones must be brought forward even against their wishes to deliver national assignments. However, they must be mixed with younger ones to train and inspire them.
Nigeria does not want to fail again. The democratic prosperity of the country lies on the success of this administration, so it is the responsibility of all Nigerians to pitch in and contribute toward upholding the democratic virtues in Nigeria. The failure of this administration will be tantamount to dampening the spirit of democratic transparency and honesty. The struggle that Nigerians undertook to ensure democracy prevails must be compensated with excellent performance by the government, and this cannot happen without people like SLS.
This is the time we need to flush out corruption entirely from Nigeria, the time to put back our economy back on track. The time to restore the value of the Naira, the time to diversify the economy, and the time to create more jobs. And SLS has all it takes to help this administration achieve these objectives. I will call it a suicide mission if Nigeria fails this time around, while people like SLS are just watching on the throne.
It sounds delusional for some promising royal families to be obsessed to the traditional institutions. There is much more SLS can offer to humanity than just being a king. It is sad that such a resource person is consumed by obsession for traditional institution. Despite SLS’s vast experience, he is now confined to a particular place, ruling only the people of Kano without much economic and political power to make decisive changes. SLS is now under the state control managed by politicians, whose rules sometimes supersedes that of the king.
In modern democratic structure, traditional rulers have little or no role; most of their duties are now placed on relevant government ministries and departments. The question therefore is what is the compelling roles of kings in our societies today that will prevent them from offering their services to the country? Some will say they settle disputes and serve as a monument of the historical lineage of the then powerful kings, who fought wars and institute governance pre-colonial era. The king is more or less ceremonial, because in every district, he has representative who is closer to the people and settles their disputes. So, a king can even rule from anywhere, as long as he receives reports from the districts and royal heads. With Sharia courts, people may not have to resort to the emirates to settle grievances any more. I do not intend to condemn the entire traditional institution, because at least I am a fan of durbar back in Katsina, and I love to see the traditional heads in their royal horses with beautiful decorations.
Therefore, you can see now SLS is beyond just being a Kano king, in fact, he was the preferred presidential candidate of many, and until he was appointed emir, he was among the front presidential hopefuls. His speech at the Abuja TeDex convinced many young people that he has what it takes to rule not just Kano but Nigeria. Nigerians should rise and demand for the service of SLS once again. He should pull off that turban and take eight years sabbatical leave from the emirate and come to Abuja as minister of finance, and then he can go back and rule Kano till his death. While he is on the sabbatical leave, he can keep visiting the emirate just like the way Buhari visits his farm regularly. SLS may wish to continue wearing his royal attires, and will always go to Kano for the official durbar ceremony twice a year.
Therefore, I call on PMB to appoint SLS as a minister in his cabinet, and force him to accept the offer in the event he hesitates.
Dr. Ahmed Adamu,Petroleum Economist and Development Expert,Pioneer Global Chairperson of Commonwealth Youth Council,University Lecturer (Economics), Umaru Musa Yar’adua University Katsina.
Wednesday 17 June 2015
Youth to Buhari: Support your govt with young people
Chairperson of the Commonwealth Youth Council (CYC) Ahmed Adamu has advised President Muhammadu Buhari to appoint young people into his government to give it the necessary energy to perform.
In a statement issued in London where the council that speaks on behalf of some 1.2 billion youth in the commonwealth countries, Adamu said “Mr President does not have to worry about his limitations as long as he knows how to make best use of the young people in his administration”.
The statement is coming on the heels of comments credited to president Buhari that at his current age of 72, there was limitation to how much he could do. He reportedly said so in South Africa on Monday during a meeting with Nigeria residents in the country.
He said “we as young people, we will continue to support his administration in any way possible, because we are equally responsible for the success of this administration.”
Read more at http://www.dailytrust.com.ng/daily/index.php/news-menu/news/57540-youth-to-buhari-support-your-govt-with-young-people#kqGcluE6iV8OQtzY.99
Buhari's old age
By Dr. Ahmed Adamu
The recent proclamation by the Nigerian president about his age
constraint has justified more on the inevitability of youth participation in
governance. At an old age, Mr President cannot do so many things he is expected
to do, but he can make use of the excessive vigour in the young people to move
his administration faster.
President Buhari was reported to have confessed that sometimes his age
can get in the way of getting the job done, and that he wished he became
president at a younger age. He was perceived to have missed his active energy
when he was a young governor. He said, at the age of 72, there is limit to what
he can do.
Mr President does not have to worry about his limitations as long as he
knows how to make best use of the young people in his administration. The
current young generation have more energy than he had as a young governor, and
therefore he can balance it up by bringing young people very close to his
administration.
There have been huge expectation on Mr President, and if he has to rely
on the low pace energy of the old, he could not catch up half way to the expectations.
We understand that governance needs careful thoughts and plan, but young people
can think and plan carefully as well. Young people are active partners of
today’s progress. Mr President should reckon young people as partners not only
as children.
The young people are the ones to live and immortalise his legacies, and
without them being drawn closer, his legacy will go down with him. The legacies
of Ahmadu Sardauna live in our time because of his legacy of empowering the
then young people, who as a result became leaders of this nation. What legacy
is Buhari preparing to live behind? The answer lies in the youth. We want to
see many younger Buharis in our generation.
We as young people, we will continue to support his administration in
any way possible, because we are equally responsible for the success of this
administration.
Ahmed Adamu
Chairperson/President, Commonwealth Youth Council
Wednesday 10 June 2015
SPEECH BY THE PRESIDENT/CHAIRPERSON, COMMONWEALTH YOUTH COUNCIL, AHMED ADAMU, DURING THE ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE COUNCIL FOR EDUCATION IN THE COMMONWEALTH, HELD AT BRITISH COUNCIL HEADQUARTERS, 10 SPRING GARDENS, LONDON, ON TUESDAY, 2ND JUNE 2015
Title: Educational engagement and out of school youth in the Commonwealth: Unpacking educational inequalities
According to UNESCO report, adolescents are more likely to be out of school than children, and there are more than 121 million children and adolescents across the world who never started school or dropped out, and this has caused concern about the future prosperity of the Commonwealth. It also costs a lot on these nations, for example in Nigeria, it was reported that the country loose equivalent to 15% of its GDP due to out of school population, whom would have added value to the economy if educated.
Because education is monetized, the issue of affordability becomes a concern, and that’s what underpins the large inequality between nations and individuals in terms of access to quality education. Even though, researches have shown that there is no absolute positive correlation between income status of a country and the level of its literacy as some poor countries that spend less per capita achieve high level of literacy. However, income status has remained huge cause of inequality among individuals.
Children of the rich have higher propensity of having access to quality education than the children of the poor. There is also inequality in terms of ethnic and cultural persuasions, though there was a tremendous change in perception about formal education in some strong cultural societies, there are still remnants of such indifferent attitude toward formal education in those society. Inequality between genders is the prominent one, as women are perceived as domestic properties rather than active participant in societal development.
The illusion that women's formal education is not important, as even if they went to the school, it is useless as they will eventually get married. That was the fundamental and wrong belief that causes gender inequality in educational system. Women require special provisions at educational environments, which often not provided. Female students feel more comfortable seeing a mixture of male and female teachers, or rather pure female teachers. However, there are fewer female teachers in some countries. These and so many other reasons cause the huge gaps between genders.
The women education is paramount, as we are taught that educating one woman is like educating the whole society. This is because women nurture all classes of people we have in society, and the best discipline and knowledge we receive comes from mothers, and that’s why girl’s education is very important.
Inequality as a result of disability; young people with special requirements are literally forced out of school because there are no provision to cater for their unique circumstances, and subsequently, they become hopeless and feel not part of the society. Researchers have found that people with disabilities if adequately provided with educational facilities can outperform regular students. There are also inequalities between rural and urban locations, as both teachers and students prefer to live in urban areas. However, in recent times as a result of over flooding the urban areas, educational supplies in these urban cities cannot meet up the demands. Therefore, unequal economic and social opportunities between rural and urban areas has caused the locational educational inequalities.
Because of the income disparities, there are children who are perceived to be in school but are actually out of schools. There are children who are forced to engage in labour activities to help the family earn a living, these could be through hard labour or street hawking. Parents are usually worried about what a child can eat at school or back at home. Some children are out of school because they do not have mobility to travel to the far distant and only available school. So, that is why societies loose great scientists, engineers, economist etc, and you cannot quantify the economic loss of losing these latent talents. Similarly, lack of quality education cause continuous violence and restiveness in society, which is another social cost of unequal access to education.
Education and poverty are therefore a vicious cycle; if you are not educated you are three times more likely to be poor, and when you are poor you are equally unlikely to be educated. Therefore, we have to ask ourselves to what extend should we monetise our educational system. Education is like the air we breathe, you need air to live, and you don’t pay for it. Equally education should be accessible for all and relatively affordable.
According to the Commonwealth Youth Development Index, educational outcomes are not wholly dependent on income of a nation (at country level). Poor nations can achieve high levels of education, and this is further evidenced by the fact that government spending and education do not correlate highly. For instance, Tonga (a Commonwealth country) achieves almost complete youth literacy whilst spending less than the United Kingdom. Therefore, size, income, location, and history of a country does not influence the quality and accessibility of its education systems.
What matters are the all-inclusive and robust educational policy, compliance and strong monitoring and evaluation systems. There should be a general and disaggregated educational indices that can be used to understand the context of the educational issues for policy priority and evaluation. If for example we have an index that say there are 1 million out of school young people in xx year, then these statistic should be monitored in years to come so that we can gauge to what extend our educational policy are impacting by now looking at the number of the out of school children. Poverty alleviation programmes can help improve access to education.
Education is not only about passage of knowledge, it is about communication, and it does not make sense to me to teach a child with a strange language. That is why primary and secondary schools should be taught in mother’s tongue or regular language in the community. Second languages like English, Arabic or French should be taught as a separate language study within the educational system. So that, children can learn to speak a common language for international and national interactions and for communication purpose. Targets and professionals goals should be set for every student, and should be coached toward achieving that particular goal. Student loans should be provided for those that want to further their education. Appreciation incentives should be provided to parents who send their kids to school regularly.
Teachers at primary and secondary schools should receive equal salary as those of polytechnic lecturers, so that best brains can be attracted to teach at the foundation levels. Countries that spend so much is sponsoring students abroad should save the money and build their local universities so that more people can access quality education within the country, rather than allowing it for the few lucky ones. Special training and courses can be sponsored abroad, but, it is an economic cost to keep sponsoring students abroad to study regular courses that can be offered locally. With the savings from reducing the foreign scholarships, government can train and hire more qualified teachers and provide the required facilities locally. Corruption in managing educational budget must be squarely addressed.
Finally, the importance of education cannot be over emphasized, as education correlate with life expectancy, wellbeing, gender equality and development. Therefore, I recommend demonetization of education. Instead of spending money on weapons for wars, and power competition, let’s put that money to the educational sector. We as citizen of the world, we must not live in isolation, we must be sensitive to other nations’ backwardness and help them prosper. Let us compete in knowledge and education, rather than competing in nuclear and wealth.
Thank you
Ahmed Adamu
President/Chairperson, Commonwealth Youth Council.
Tuesday 2 June 2015
SPEECH BY THE PRESIDENT/CHAIRPERSON, COMMONWEALTH YOUTH COUNCIL, AHMED ADAMU, DURING THE ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE COUNCIL FOR EDUCATION IN THE COMMONWEALTH, HELD AT BRITISH HOUSE HEADQUARTERS, 10 SPRING GARDENS, LONDON, ON TUESDAY, 2ND JUNE 2015
Title: Educational
engagement and out of school youth in the Commonwealth: Unpacking educational
inequalities
More than 60% of the Commonwealth population are made up of
young people, who represent the hope and strength of the Commonwealth
sustainability. The best way to prepare these young people is by giving them
the deserved quality education. That is why the young people in the
Commonwealth consider quality education as number priority as contained in the
2013 Hambantota Youth Declaration. By extension, education is the number one
mandate of the Commonwealth Youth Council, being the official voice for the
young people. The question we ask ourselves is how qualitative and accessible
is the education.
According to UNESCO report, adolescents are more likely to
be out of school than children, and there are more than 121 million children
and adolescents across the world who never started school or dropped out, and
this has caused concern about the future prosperity of the Commonwealth. It
also costs a lot on these nations, for example in Nigeria, it was reported that
the country loose equivalent to 15% of its GDP due to out of school population,
whom would have added value to the economy if educated.
Because education is monetized, the issue of affordability
becomes a concern, and that’s what underpins the large inequality between
nations and individuals in terms of access to quality education. Even though,
researches have shown that there is no absolute positive correlation between
income status of a country and the level of its literacy as some poor countries
that spend less per capita achieve high level of literacy. However, income
status has remained huge cause of inequality among individuals.
Children of the rich have higher propensity of having access
to quality education than the children of the poor. There is also inequality in
terms of ethnic and cultural persuasions, though there was a tremendous change
in perception about formal education in some strong cultural societies, there
are still remnants of such indifferent attitude toward formal education in those
society. Inequality between genders is the prominent one, as women are
perceived as domestic properties rather than active participant in societal
development.
The illusion that women’s formal education is not important,
as even if they went to the school, it is useless as they will eventually get
married. That was the fundamental and wrong belief that causes gender
inequality in educational system. Women require special provisions at
educational environments, which often not provided. Female students feel more
comfortable seeing a mixture of male and female teachers, or rather pure female
teachers. However, there are fewer female teachers in some countries. These and
so many other reasons cause the huge gaps between genders.
The women education is paramount, as we are taught that
educating one woman is like educating the whole society. This is because women
nurture all classes of people we have in society, and the best discipline and
knowledge we receive comes from mothers, and that’s why girl’s education is
very important.
Inequality as a result of disability; young people with
special requirements are literally forced out of school because there are no
provision to cater for their unique circumstances, and subsequently, they
become hopeless and feel not part of the society. Researchers have found that
people with disabilities if adequately provided with educational facilities can
outperform regular students. There are also inequalities between rural and
urban locations, as both teachers and students prefer to live in urban areas.
However, in recent times as a result of over flooding the urban areas,
educational supplies in these urban cities cannot meet up the demands.
Therefore, unequal economic and social opportunities between rural and urban
areas has caused the locational educational inequalities.
Because of the income disparities, there are children who
are perceived to be in school but are actually out of schools. There are
children who are forced to engage in labour activities to help the family earn
a living, these could be through hard labour or street hawking. Parents are
usually worried about what a child can eat at school or back at home. Some
children are out of school because they do not have mobility to travel to the
far distant and only available school. So, that is why societies loose great
scientists, engineers, economist etc, and you cannot quantify the economic loss
of losing these latent talents. Similarly, lack of quality education cause
continuous violence and restiveness in society, which is another social cost of
unequal access to education.
Education and poverty are therefore a vicious cycle; if you
are not educated you are three times more likely to be poor, and when you are
poor you are equally unlikely to be educated. Therefore, we have to ask
ourselves to what extend should we monetise our educational system. Education
is like the air we breathe, you need air to live, and you don’t pay for it.
Equally education should be accessible for all and relatively affordable.
According to the Commonwealth Youth Development Index,
educational outcomes are not wholly dependent on income of a nation (at country
level). Poor nations can achieve high levels of education, and this is further
evidenced by the fact that government spending and education do not correlate
highly. For instance, Tonga (a Commonwealth country) achieves almost complete
youth literacy whilst spending less than the United Kingdom. Therefore, size,
income, location, and history of a country does not influence the quality and
accessibility of its education systems.
What matters are the all-inclusive and robust educational
policy, compliance and strong monitoring and evaluation systems. There should
be a general and disaggregated educational indices that can be used to understand
the context of the educational issues for policy priority and evaluation. If
for example we have an index that say there are 1 million out of school young
people in xx year, then these statistic should be monitored in years to come so
that we can gauge to what extend our educational policy are impacting by now
looking at the number of the out of school children. Poverty alleviation
programmes can help improve access to education.
Education is not only about passage of knowledge, it is
about communication, and it does not make sense to me to teach a child with a
strange language. That is why primary and secondary schools should be taught in
mother’s tongue or regular language in the community. Second languages like
English, Arabic or French should be taught as a separate language study within
the educational system. So that, children can learn to speak a common language
for international and national interactions and for communication purpose.
Targets and professionals goals should be set for every student, and should be
coached toward achieving that particular goal. Student loans should be provided
for those that want to further their education. Appreciation incentives should
be provided to parents who send their kids to school regularly.
Teachers at primary and secondary schools should receive
equal salary as those of polytechnic lecturers, so that best brains can be
attracted to teach at the foundation levels. Countries that spend so much is
sponsoring students abroad should save the money and build their local
universities so that more people can access quality education within the
country, rather than allowing it for the few lucky ones. Special training and
courses can be sponsored abroad, but, it is an economic cost to keep sponsoring
students abroad to study regular courses that can be offered locally. With the
savings from reducing the foreign scholarships, government can train and hire
more qualified teachers and provide the required facilities locally. Corruption
in managing educational budget must be squarely addressed.
Finally, the importance of education cannot be over
emphasized, as education correlate with life expectancy, wellbeing, gender
equality and development. Therefore, I recommend demonetization of education.
Instead of spending money on weapons for wars, and power competition, let’s put
that money to the educational sector. We as citizen of the world, we must not
live in isolation, we must be sensitive to other nations’ backwardness and help
them prosper. Let us compete in knowledge and education, rather than competing
in nuclear and wealth.
Thank you
Ahmed Adamu
President/Chairperson, Commonwealth Youth
Council.Monday 1 June 2015
BUHARI SHOULD PROFESSIONALISE SMALL SKILLED LABOUR
By Dr. Ahmed Adamu
More than 40% of the unemployed and underemployed in Nigeria
engage in small-skilled labour or what some termed as unskilled or hard labour,
and these people are potentially vulnerable to abuse, exploitation,
discriminations, and seldom used to perpetuate crimes. Heroes are also those
young people who reject the myth of their generation apathy, and endured all
the hardships to earn their living legally. Refusing to take shortcuts, and
remain contented with their little income. When I look at these brave young
people, I do not only see bricklayers, labourers, plumbers, electricians,
commercial motorcyclists, security guards, pushers of wheelbarrow, local toilet
plushers etc. what I see are nation builders, service providers, highly-skilled
labourers and movers of the economy. Some might consider them as unskilled or
semi-skilled labourers, but the nation will realise how inelastic their
services are, when these groups of small-skilled labourers organise themselves
and go for a month strike; then we will realise that we cannot build the houses
we live in, we can’t fix electric issues in our houses, we can’t push our loads
in the parks or market places, and we can’t do the hard labour in other
construction works. Then the whole country will stand still. That is the least
you can imagine how important these small-skilled labourers are.
Imagine a young man spending thirty years doing hard labour,
many times underpaid and exploited, and yet endured. This same young man will
build tenths of houses, offices and roads, and when he gets old and no longer
having the strength to do these jobs, he gets nothing to feed himself and his
family, and he will eventually resort to begging to sustain his life. His
greatest asset, his strength, is exhausted. Why can’t he receives pension
allowances in appreciation for his service to the nation? I think some of these
young men deserve better pension scheme and wage package than some of the
negligent government workers and politicians.
In some developed countries, small-skilled labourers earn high,
as their services are appreciated and recognised. For example, in UK, the wage
for every handyman is regulated and standardised according to locations; A
bricklayer gets around N100 per brick laid, and Handyman doing odd jobs gets
N5,600 per hour, gas heating boiler services for N16,800 etc. These are
regulated for London location, and therefore clients cannot cheat or exploit
their service providers, and vice versa. This also helps in predicting cost of
production. This are usually reviewed timely to accommodate market changes. By
regulating and standardising small-skilled jobs, unemployed young graduates
will then start estimating how much they would be losing for every one hour
lost doing nothing. They would then realise that, they only need a particular
skill to earn certain amount of money in one hour or per load of work/service.
This will attract young people to learn skills despite the chunks of their
educational certificates.
Therefore, regulating and standardising the wages for small
skilled labourers as well as creation of their unique health and pension scheme
will motivate young people to engage in skills acquisitions. These hard labour
or small-skilled jobs should be professionalised, someone who spent three years
working as a plumber or electrician should be considered as having a
professional work experience for three years. He can add that to his CV. They
should be encouraged to set up an organisation, which will register all members
engaged in these types of jobs. Their organisation will be protecting and
advocating for their interests, and will provide frequent trainings and ensure
improvement of quality of their work/services. Their organisation will receive
certain incentives to subsidise their work and to help reduce charge rate.
These incentives will be shared among its members. The government will set
requirements for every small-skilled workers association, which might include,
significance, charge rate, quality of work, decency of the workers, compliance
to standard and regulations etc.
If young people engaged in these small-skilled jobs are
recognised as professionals and receive attractive wages, the percentage of
youth unemployed will be reduced by at least 20%. Therefore, in an effort to
reduce unemployment and poverty, small-skilled labour should be
professionalised. Educational institutional curriculum should also provide wide
range of vocational and technical skills, so that young graduates may not have
to learn these skills after their education, they can automatically start
providing services immediately after their studies, and they do not have to
wait for government jobs.
Thank you
Ahmed Adamu
Economist
Economist
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