In 2015, the ruling party the APC campaigned on a change mantra. I and a lot of my friends and family were excited and pushed for President Buhari to win because as a person, I was of the opinion that PDP had failed the people. I was also of the opinion that if an incumbent can be kicked out at the federal level, then the incoming government will be on its toes. I was also happy with the change mantra as I read it to mean a change in the way things are done in Nigeria and not just a change of the ruling PDP.
However, the PDP and APC campaign have been throwing jabs at each other with the APC also listing infrastructure, social programs among other things as its achievements in the past few years. I want to highlight what in my view are the critical success factors(CSF) which I believe should be key whoever wins the next election. Critical success factor is a management term for an element that is necessary for an organization or project to achieve its mission. In lay man terms, when you want to get an admission into university, most courses will ask for English and/or math and three other subjects depending on your course. The English is a critical success factor in this context because if you score A in all the others and score an F in English, you still won’t be considered as a success. I will be focusing on Security, Education, Health, Food Security and the Corruption fight. Please note that these CSFs are also applicable to state governors too.

SECURITY
Most times when we speak about security most people talk about the clashes and terrorists and book haram. I believe the most primary form of security which is the police has been a failure since 1999 till date. Nigerians don’t trust the police. There are few police success stories such as the likes of Abba Kyari and others but in general the Nigerian police are perceived with corruption. For example, the policemen who are posted in banks/companies and who guard VIPs, do they do it for free? Or do the banks and VIPS pay into the TSA for this protection? Remember that it was the Nigerian Police who killed Yusuf the founder of Boko Haram in handcuffs claiming he was trying to escape thus causing the book haram to go underground. Whenever the police encounters a crime scene, do they have best practice forensic tools and intelligence training to solve the crime or do they just torture and get confessions? I believe the Nigerian police should be well funded and trained and restructured. I don’t believe banks, companies and VIPs should have police attached to them as this makes the police which should be for the protection of the masses elitist. I hope one day I can visit a local police station in Ikorodu and the statement of a suspect can be taken electronically with finger prints captured and uploaded to a secured police database with the investigation carried our professionally same way the LAPD or Scotland Yard or even police of Botswana will do. Our police have been ranked as one of the worst in the world. We have the brains, we just need the structure. A police you can trust and believe in is a critical success factor.


EDUCATION

Just like security, when you talk about education, the next thing people tend to focus on is university education. Nigeria is an inverted country. It's only in Nigeria that you pay 35k per year for a course in Unilag and also pay 100k minimum per year for a cheap private primary school simply because nobody who has a choice will ever send their child to a public primary school but can send the same child when he or she grows up to a public university. How can we be proud of Unilag and not be proud of araromi primary school. It's only in Nigeria that they will say cut off mark for Common entrance in Zamfara is 15 while the cut off in imo or Ogun is 54. This indicates that if you have 20 marks from nasarrawa you can get admission to Queens college over someone who had 50 from imo simply because the nasarrawa person was born "dumb" ? This has been happening for decades and no one is doing anything about it. A state of emergency should be declared in the north regarding quality of primary education rather than reducing the cut off mark specifically for them. It affects them in the long run.
I don't think any federal government college has been created since 1999 and even the existing ones are not expanded thus making secondary education to be more in private hands. School fees is killing a lot of households especially primary and secondary fees in the search for quality education. Imagine this scenario:you are working and paying your tax or even if you are not working and the public primary and secondary schools are of standard quality (teachers,teaching environment and teaching materials/methods), imagine you not having to pay school fees for almost 9 years of primary school and six years of secondary school. It happens in other countries too. I will rather not pay school fees for that period for proper funding of public primary and secondary then pay a premium fee to Unilag compared to the current system where you pay a premium for primary school education and secondary school education then pay Unilag your annual money for data subscription as school fees. I don’t think the school feeding can solve this problem. If children can be fed from Abuja, other aspects of their education can also be affected from Abuja. That the local government control public primary schools shouldn’t be an excuse. No matter the infrastructure we build, if we continue to have more children out of school and the poverty gap continues to expand, whatever we build today will be destroyed tomorrow.

Health

Whether we like it or not, PUBLIC healthcare in Nigeria is going down .Doctors are leaving the country in droves and our public hospitals. I hope and pray that the incoming government will at least try to ensure that federal teaching hospitals can partner to world class teaching hospitals all over the world so as to have exchange of research and improvement of facilities. Hospitals can also have specializations and this can be encouraged to extend to state teaching hospitals and general hospitals. The MOST Important however is the primary health care centers. These centers are closer to the people however it is a sad state at times. There have been cases where women who want to give birth in such centers are given lists including petrol to bring along to aid their delivery in case the generator is needed to be used. All in All, quality healthcare is elitist. To get quality healthcare, you need serious money and it’s no surprise even our leaders don’t want to even take the risk here and always fly out of the country to take care of themselves. A lot of people of died due to underfunding of this sector. Funding of health through the NHIS also needs to be looked into and other ways to fund it. If there is any sector that needs subsidy, it has to be health and education. Quality should be number one priority before affordability hence subsidy may be needed after all due to poverty levels.

CORRUPTION

To explain corruption in Nigeria, I like to use an analogy. There is a tank of water with about 5 holes leaking underneath. Water is continually pumped into the tank and it continues to leak. Corrupt people or opportunists exploit the loop hole by going underneath the tank to fetch water rather than going through the tap like the normal way. The good news is one of the holes has been blocked by the introduction of the TSA(Treasury Single Account). The EFCCs job is to go after those that try to fetch from the holes and when they succeed they poor it back into the tank only for the holes to be exploited by a new set of people. Integrity or lack of integrity of a leader cannot alone suppress corruption; it takes innovation like the introduction of the TSA.
However the easiest way to steal in the government now is through procurement fraud and contract fraud. It may not surprise you to know that the cost of a Panasonic AC unit at NNPC can be three times more expensive than the cost of the same AC in another government agency. The award of contracts is also a major source of corruption. One man can own all the companies that participate in a bidding process which then makes it a formality. I believe that every MDA should publish their contracts and procurement activities and associated costs on their official website. The procurement council should also be inaugurated and empowered to remove the power from the FEC to award projects. Most governors steal through award of contracts.
Apart from innovation, fighting corruption can also be done via complete transparency. The FG for example spends 600 million naira daily feeding children in primary schools; I don’t think this is transparent enough. It would have been nice to have a website listing the number of children for each school and each local government that is involved and the numbers all over the country and a weekly report. Imagine if someone just decides to not feed all of the students in a week, that’s three billion naira lost already.i often ask myself if the loop holes that allowed dizeani to allegedly embezzle through proxies in nnpc have been blocked or not ? In developed countries, it’s not as if they don’t have bad people or corrupt people but the system is innovative and transparent and also if you steal, the system will come for you.

Food security over agriculture is also critical. That food becomes available and affordable is critical. People don’t eat policies in agric and CBN interventions, let food be available and affordable is critical.

All in All, I hope whoever wins this election will consider all this and try to make Nigeria better because I as a person is losing hope day by day. God help Nigeria.Written by LyonCrescent for Nairaland Politics Section

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