Budget amendment or priority amendment?

Although the presidency has a cogent reason for the refusal, we are yet to hear clearly from them as to why the proposed amendment should not hold. Nigeria really needs to pump capital investment into education and health infrastructures.We have youth wasting at home, doing nothing, we have businessmen and women who fall victim of […]

Although the presidency has a cogent reason for the refusal, we are yet to hear clearly from them as to why the proposed amendment should not hold. Nigeria really needs to pump capital investment into education and health infrastructures.
We have youth wasting at home, doing nothing, we have businessmen and women who fall victim of our bad roads, we have pregnant women who die in child birth even in the federal capital. It is such a shame we cannot put our acts together and do something tangible. The presidency should explain better in another media chat why the proposed budget amendment was shunned while crude oil prices flew high over the past weeks.
Shortage of funds can’t be offered as reason. I might be short sighted and fail to see beyond my naivety what such amendment might actually cost the federal government, but I have other international economists who work in various research institutions and banking sector supporting the amendment.
We have two Asian tigers who we have been doing business with over the decades. The pain of “Nigerianess” is we hardly learn anything from these two countries as we trade with them on continuous basis.
China and India were educating their citizens abroad in engineering and core sciences in the mid-70s to late ‘80s.  Nigeria was counting on her luck in the newly found oil boom taking toll in the government and private sectors.  When the education of their citizens climaxed, they returned home and supported the growth that spurred the trade we are lost in.  China concentrated on manufacturing, India on services.  Now, both countries are exporting capital to global economy by a whooping sum of $2 trillion.  If Nigeria had mounted the trend of early ‘80s to educate larger proportion of her citizens, we wouldn’t be running abroad for headache and stomach ache.  The amazing fact is: these two countries have expatriates all over Africa and more of them are still coming. What are Nigerian leaders doing? Most are still lost in our  lip services to our country that gave so many of them hope and inspiration when there was none. Most of them schooled on scholarship, now the schools  are not even available even if you have your money topay for your own education.  I am not even about a country with robust budget with capacity for foreign trades. I am talking about creating a nation where people have sufficiency of what common sense and hard work could offer every decent labour of her inhabitants.
A practical development index by international financial institutions like the World Bank has ranked us as one of thelowest in human development in Africa. The presidency should tell us why the amendment regarding this current budget will not hold. When the World Bank Afro Barometer ranks Nigeria as low on human development index, I thought it was a joke until  I lost a sister to common childbirth.

Unekwu Peters Onyilo, an author, sent this letter from Lokoja, Kogi State.