One of the policy takeaways from the recent gaffe by Nigeria’s minister of labour is that the country’s problems appear intractable more from wrong diagnosis and faulty approaches than from the nature of these challenges. After all, nations all over the world are going through tough problems, but countries that tackle their difficulties with the relevant tools are recording successes.
It is not so with Nigeria, and an excellent example of why Nigeria’s problems appear intractable manifested in Dr Chris Ngige’s profoundly faulty claims and prognosis of a serious human problem.
Ngige, a medical doctor by training and politician by profession, told Nigerians and the whole world on TV that Nigeria, the leading developing and poor country had (as at the date of his interview) a surplus of medical doctors), and therefore that this poor country could afford not to care whether the medical doctors stayed in the country or left.
It is odious that a man who has served as minister of labour for close to four years could utter such a claim, the infantile attempts later by his media assistant to insinuate that his boss was misquoted, notwithstanding.
Some pertinent questions arise from his claim. Could Ngige have made this claim if he had with him in the TV studio his counterpart in the Ministry of Health? What would the minister of health have said in response to this bogus claim?
The point here is that our public sector is characterised by discordant tunes. That explains why there are often various versions of the same information sourced from different units of the government.
Is it possible that at the end of Nigige’s tenure one of the conclusions he will put in his handover note to President Buhari is that Nigeria has a surplus of medical doctors and therefore that government should not bother itself about that sector. If that is so, Nigerians would also want to know his summary of the situation in other sectors of the economy.
The import of Ngige’s comment should not be limited to just the medical profession. A minister’s utterance carries weight and tells a lot about his disposition and capacity as a public servant on whom the nation depends for the articulation of possible solutions to one of the challenging problems facing Nigeria: unemployment.
It is instructive that a few days after his TV debacle, the minister said in a statement to an event that Nigeria indeed faced a critical unemployment problem, with the unemployment ratio projected to be about 35 percent in the next few years. Unemployment is real, and must be confronted with deliberate planning.
Being a minister in Nigeria of today has passed that stage where office holders regaled in the tradition of “talk now, think later,” under which they often hid to mask their incompetence. In such situations, they often resort to the claim that they were misquoted, as has already happened in this case.
Unemployment has been described variously, including as a time bomb, and the cause of the diverse vices threatening the survival of nations, including Nigeria. Therefore, any fellow appointed to head the ministry of labour cannot afford to be flippant about his duties. Such a fellow should, at the minimum, be a creative, innovative thinker, an astute manager of resources.
Policymaking, including finding solutions to unemployment, is not magic; it is a scientific approach to problem solving. It starts with a frame. Framing seeks to situate the problem by first admitting that there is indeed a problem known by its definite nature. Frames give meaning to the problem being analysed or discussed for purposes of identifying causal factors and therefore prescribing possible solutions. Therefore, if the identification and framing stages are faulty, as the minister clearly showed, it is a foregone conclusion that the prescription is bound to be unfruitful. This explains why the nation’s problems persist despite endless meetings at the ministries and departments.
The nature of policy making is that there is often a gap between problem identification and policy articulation to address the problem, and the actually implementation of the measures. Sometimes, the delay arises from differences among the policy analysts in terms of the real cause of a problem and appropriate policy instruments to tackle the issue. Ngige’s postulation means that we are far from seeing an end to the challenges in our labour market.
What Nigeria has is cheap labour, not necessarily surplus labour. And that is why many Nigerians, whether doctors, nurses, teachers, or even cleaners, queuing at foreign embassies for visas to countries where their labour power commands higher values.
This is the reality in the developing world. Labour in Nigeria and the rest of developing world is cheap simply because of the law of demand and supply. When these countries grow their capacities to the point where the human factor is fully put into use, then labour will be able to command its appropriate price.
The solution is certainly not for the government to fold its hands, and wish them safe journey. The ministers, with Ngige or whoever will come after him, as the coordinator, should drive this process.
Vincent Nwanma
