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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Ezekwesili’s Fishy PPP
Last Friday, Daily Trust published an advert by the well-respected religious leader and educationist, Sheikh Ahmed Lemu, President of the Da’wah Coordination Council of Nigeria. Sheikh Lemu’s quarter-page advert may have escaped the attention of many readers but it deserved the attention of each and every Nigerian.
Its subject was secondary education, more specifically the controversial proposal made public late last year by the not-so-new Minister of Education, Mrs. Obiageli Ezekwesili. This was the proposal to sell off the Federal Government “unity schools” to private entities, a proposal she was forced to modify as a Public Private Partnership (PPP) Initiative following the speedy and vehement manner the public rejected it.
Sheikh Lemu’s advert sought to draw the public’s attention to what he said was the minister’s undue haste in implementing a proposal the public has yet to accept.
At first, Lemu point out, there was silence from the Federal Ministry of Education after it was forced to retreat from its semi-privatization plan. “Suddenly”, he added, “on January 26, 2007 a newspaper advert appeared inviting interested groups to bid to become School Management Organizations to operate the unity schools. The closing date for bidders is 16th February. Many individuals and even state Ministries of Education and State Governors do not seem to be aware of the situation... What looks particularly fishy about the whole thing is the unnecessary haste to push it through just before National Elections and in the middle of the academic session.”
Lemu’s concern is clearly about the haste in the implementation of the PPP proposal rather in the PPP itself. This writer believes there is a serious problem not just with the speed of its implementation but also with the proposal itself.
At the core of the whole reform programme of the Obasanjo administration are the arguments that public ownership of even so-called commanding heights of any economy is wasteful and opaque and does not deliver value for money. This argument seems hard, if not impossible, to dismiss. If we take the unity schools as an example, it is hard to dismiss the minister of education’s dissatisfaction with the way they have been managed all these many years. According to ministry officials, the schools, numbering no more than 102, consume about 20 billion Naira annually to run. This is a huge amount to spend on institutions that cater for only a very small fraction of the country’s huge secondary school population.
On this count alone no right thinking person will disagree with the minister that there is a need for reforming the way, not only the unity schools, but the entire education sector is managed. The problem, however, are the reformers’ assumptions that the apparent failure of public-sector controlled education is, to begin with, inevitable, and, second, that the failure dictates a swing to the other end, i.e. privatization of education in one disguise or another. Both assumptions are wrong.
First, there is nothing inevitable about the apparent collapse of our public-sector controlled education system. The rise of the Asian Tigers, and even more so the rise lately of China and India, is enough testimony that public-sector education, which has been the bedrock of their economic rise, can deliver the goods. Conversely the collapse of Enron as one of the biggest energy giants in America, especially following its inability to deliver electricity to its customers cheaper and more reliably than the public utilities it had replaced, is proof positive that privatization of utilities is not necessarily the panacea that free-market champions say the free market is.
Early morning last Sunday I listened to a BBC programme on Britain’s famed National Health Service. The BBC wanted to establish whether the partial corporate take-over of the NHS since the ascendancy of so-called New Labour under Tony Blair about 10 years ago has made the service better. Predictably there were mixed reactions from those interviewed. However, the one thing that even the advocates of privatization could not deny was that the NHS had not become more efficient or more transparent than it was before its semi-privatization.
To establish whether or not its semi-privatization had made it more efficient and transparent, the BBC interviewed officials of both the health department and of a private company which had been handed over the management of a major U.K. hospital. The BBC asked the officials the simple question of how much the new arrangement cost the tax-payer. Neither would say how much using the clearly untenable excuse that such information was “commercially sensitive”. Yet without the knowledge of how much the reform cost the tax-payer it was impossible to know whether or not the service had become more efficient and more transparent than before its semi-privatization.
Obviously, it is not unfair to suspect that both the New Labour advocates of privatization and the officials of the management company had something to hide. This bears a striking similarity to our own privatization exercise that has been characterized by lack of full disclosure of the values of the utilities being sold off and by the bending of the rules of privatization to favour preferred bidders.
I do not know the details of the NHS reform. Neither do I know that of Ezekwesili’s PPP. However, broadly speaking, one can safely say they are similar in their philosophy, objective and strategy. On the surface it is hard to fault the philosophy of Public Private Partnership in the delivery of goods to society; it only stands to logic that if neither public nor private sector, each on its own, can deliver all the goods all the time, the two must collaborate.
Therefore, the problem is not so much such collaboration as one of which sector should drive the partnership, depending on the nature of the goods to be delivered. Education, like health, is a social good and the private sector has historically proved too profit-oriented to deliver social goods at a price most ordinary people can afford. From the little that one knows of Ezekwesili’s PPP, and certainly from the philosophy that has driven President Obasanjo’s overall reform, the private sector would most likely take control, if not the ownership, of the unity schools.
This is why, unlike Sheikh Ahmed Lemu, I believe Ezekwesili’s idea of PPP is wrong not only in the speed of its implementation, but also in its very concept.
Now, it is of course possible that I have misunderstood the minister’s concept, since I, like most Nigerians, do not have enough information on it. But then this is precisely why she should hasten slowly in implementing it. For, if most Nigerians do not have enough information on her PPP, it is essentially because even if the information about it is out in the public domain, the public has not had sufficient time to debate it so as to understand and support it.
In countries like Britain and America that our elites like to copy, they spend years, not weeks or even months, to formulate policies and implement them. This is why their policies endure even when they fall short of solving the problems they are meant to attack.
For some not-so-inexplicable reason – greed perhaps? - here in Nigeria we seem recently too much in a haste to formulate policies and even more in a haste to implement them. The classic case here is the so-called bank consolidation. Barely days after the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Professor Charles Soludo, announced the consolidation plan to a conference of bankers, he and President Obasanjo gave it the stamp of policy. This was even before the plan could have been digested by anyone. And now two years after it took off, there is still no law backing it. Not surprisingly, in several of the new “mega-banks,” the forced marriages seem already on the rocks and it should surprise no one if many of them unravel with the departure of President Obasanjo in three months’ time.
As for Ezekwesili’s PPP, it was only on October 28, 2006 that the president convened a forum to debate it, along with other education issues. Then as a follow up, the minister herself sent out invitations early December to prominent Nigerians to participate in a round-table discussion on how to “develop a Ten Year Education Sector Plan that will serve as a roadmap for future education planning and management.”
It is now barely two months since the minister’s seminar which was held in December 11 and 12 and less than three months since Obasanjo’s presidential forum in the wake of which the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammadu Maccido, and several other participants at the forum died in an air crash on their way back to Sokoto. Courtesy over their tragic deaths alone demands that the minister should tarry a while in implementing her plan. More importantly, however, three months is too short a period for the formulation of any sound proposal, especially one that is meant to serve a country for at least ten years.
If Ezekwesili, as a prominent member of Obasanjo’s economic team, ever finds herself wondering why many Nigerians are often cynical about her principal’s reform programmes, she would find an answer in the indecent haste with which her government formulates its reforms and the even more indecent haste with which it implements them.
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