Nigeria must take human development seriously

Professor Muhammed Ali Pate is a former Minister of State for Health, and the Chigarin Missau. In this interview he speaks on the importance of human development and what his initiative, the Chigari Foundation is doing to improve the lives of Nigerians across the country.   Tell us about the Chigari Foundation, its aims and […]

Professor Muhammed Ali Pate is a former Minister of State for Health, and the Chigarin Missau. In this interview he speaks on the importance of human development and what his initiative, the Chigari Foundation is doing to improve the lives of Nigerians across the country.
 
Tell us about the Chigari Foundation, its aims and objectives?
Chigari Foundation aspires to provide world class leadership in supporting communities to implement actions which will positively transform lives and society. We are focusing on four key things: First is health, to ensure that children born in the country survive childhood deceases and grow into healthy adults; education, to assist the millions of kids out of school, to bring them back into the learning system; demonstrate positive examples for youths, and finding opportunities where we can help children optimally make the transition from school to work. At the moment we are starting with health and education, particularly in the North East.
We know that 20% of children in the North-east, as at 2010 had basic literacy ages 5 to 16 and only 30% had basic numeracy of 5 to 16. Which means 80% of children at that age did not have literacy and 70% did not have numeracy. This has implications for Nigeria’s development in the long run. The human capital that will develop this country is lying out there, not coming into class and learning what they need to learn. The crisis in the education system is something that government alone cannot solve.
From the civil society perspective, we have to come with other partners that we hope we’ll join hands with to accelerate progress in that direction.
 What sorts of partnerships are possible to improve the health and wellbeing of children?
Let’s not forget where we are from, understand where we are today and look to the future. Despite Nigeria’s challenges, in the last six to seven years there have been tremendous changes in certain areas. Seven years ago people doubted Nigeria would be the last African country to kick polio out; Nigeria has dealt with it. Routine immunization was a major issue but it began to improve. We have seen improvement in skilled birth attendance.
The Health Bill has now come into being along side basic policy like the primary health care under one roof. There are buildingblocks the country has started putting in place, but they need to be sustained. There’s no magic to that; we just need to make various investments. Women should not die needlessly from childbirth.
This administration talks about building thousands of primary health centres. History is a very important teacher and we should learn from history. The business of the federal government is not really in building primary health centres; administering, delivering PHCs are for states and local governments.
The federal government should provide technical support, policy, monitoring and mobilising financial support to the states and local governments which are closer to the people to implement PHC.
What should be the priorities of government in health care, considering the budget’s recent passage?
 We look forward to studying the details, but from civil society perspective, we feel it is important to safeguard the progress made on polio to ensure we get certified next year; that we should invest in routine immunisation systems, ensure there are sufficient vaccines that no Nigerian child misses the opportunity of being vaccinated, and that the human resources to deliver essential services be available.
The policy makers should ensure that their policy is such that state and local governments are able to train, retrain and incentivise health workers on the front line, and the private sector should play a complementary role in what the public sector can do. If they do that, they will be building on building blocks already on ground, and then we can do more.
What would you advise Buhari on developmental issues; women, education and young people?
 The president has many qualified advisers who have looked at a whole range of issues – economy, security, corruption. The only thing is that we wish him to succeed, and we know there are many challenges in the country. As we focus on the big issues, we also should not forget the human development aspect. There are the people who enjoy the road, the airport, the infrastructure you are talking about. The human development is about the future. What choices we make today about children, basic education, will come to fruition or not bear fruit in 20 years. Making those choices-basic health services, education, nutrition-is a good compliment to infrastructure development, because those are for people of today and also tomorrow.
What should government do when it comes to human development?
 A colleague of mine recruited 18 young people in Abuja, all unemployed. He asked them to write their names. None could. He devised an apprenticeship for them. Few days later, many of them abandoned it. Even to be a mechanic or tailor, you need to be able to take measurement, a basic numeracy.
So we thought to start with the cohort of children out of school. In the North -east, there are many of them. If you let them go by, they will grow into adults unable to do anything more than physical labour and their human capacity will not be developed. If we start with that and make a contribution, we hope others will take cue from that. At the moment we are focused on that basic education. In time we will come to entrepreneurship, skills development and creating jobs.
In the six states – Sokoto, Kano, Kaduna, Borno, Yobe, Bauchi – what we are doing is community engagement for primary health care and routine immunisation, trying to mobilise community leaders at the frontline to mobilise their communities to demand for care and improved accountability at the point of care.
We are doing an assessment of the landscape of the traditional institutions in those communities.
Polio has now been kicked out but it could not have been possible in the North without the role of the traditional leaders – the Sultan of Sokoto, the emirs, members of the northern traditional leaders committee of PHC – because at the frontline they played a very important role in mobilising communities. We shouldn’t forget the policy, political space and the management that we applied only came into place once the legitimacy of the programme was re-established by the traditional leaders.