The Governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir Elrufai has attributed Nigeria's problems especially the issue of brain drain to the discovery of oil in the country. He explained that for the problem to be addressed, the Federal Government must change the current dependence on oil and develop other sectors of the economy.
The Governor made the statement on Saturday in Ibadan while making presentation at the 2017 Founder's Day Celebration organized by Development Policy Centre in memory of Prof. Ojetunji Aboyede. He lamented that the inflow of huge oil revenue made the country lazy with successive administrations failing to develop other sectors of the economy.
According to him, “having suffered brain drain, how do we attract back our Diaspora and the brain-gain associated with it like the Chinese and Indians have witnessed? These are the questions a distributive mentality around easy oil revenues is dodging. The earlier the oil dries up the better for our national ability to think, be innovative and respect intellect and academic achievement. We get easy money, we do not collect taxes and our taxes are six per cent of Gross Domestic Product; that is an average of 21per cent. We stopped respecting the intellectuals that we have in our universities because we got easy money.”
He also said the current policing system was defective and incapable of ensuring the security of lives and properties in the country. He said part of the problem would be solved if a state police was in place.
“It is obvious that Nigeria is severely under-policed, and will require more personnel, intelligence assets, better training, technology and equipment for its security agencies for the country to be a credible guarantor of security. Even if these were to be available, it is also debatable whether a single centralized policing system, structure and staffing for 200 million citizens is viable in a diverse, multi-lingual, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic nation like Nigeria."
“To complement the pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals, we must have discourse around the imperative of a project dedicated to enabling equal opportunity so that the circumstances of a citizen’s birth do not prescribe his or her ceiling in life. How can we promote a national subscription to meritocracy? How can we ensure that the imperative of reflecting federal character does not become the enemy of merit and quality of appointments? Today, we don’t plan. We don’t have national plan and if we don’t plan, we are planning to fail.”
