Adebanjo: Devolution is the answer

Youth Party of Nigeria (YPN) presidential aspirant Rex Adebanjo, a lawyer, highlights the elements of change that will meet Nigerian’s expectations about popular rule and good governance.

Restructuring to devolve power to regions, states and local governments for optimum accountability- key to maximise development – local governments and states should be where the action is political labs to engender and try out/give free to diversity of ideas and various solutions and mostly bring government closer to the people for better accountability and responsiveness.

Security: triple the pay and number of cops with major retraining and recruitment of qualified educated unemployed youths. Make being a cop super attractive and of course this is to be developed as indigene based state policing, with fed government focussed on funding 1st class police academies for minimum standards to produce quality policemen.  Focus is to make the nation one of the safest in the world and permit night-time economies across the nation to boost employment and the government’s tax base.

Economy: new special fast track commercial courts and enforcement infrastructure to support commercial lending and  other measures to boost credit to SME’s and businesses in general and remove government from competing with business for credit rather serving as catalyst to grow the  tax base. I.e. substantially reduce or eliminate government bonds.

Continue investment in agriculture and mineral resources and support for the Dangote refinery.

Education: biggest focus. (i) Free education (including free feeding beginning with educationally disadvantaged states) (ii) Rapid deployment of solar powered E-learning in all schools and incorporation of Pre-k learning. Triple pay of teachers and retraining of teachers for 21st learning and utilisation of online resources

Education: minimum 43% of budget for education.

Unique results based retirement compensation for teachers beyond basic comp. i.e. establish plaform for grateful students to annual gift (eg at xmas etc) the teachers they deem helped them.   That way we should have some teachers become millionaires and each teacher is then incentivized to really help each and every student be successful as their success at this will benefit their future/retirement

Corruption:

Structural reforms to practically eliminate corruption with the introduction of professional panels of rotating experts to qualify top 3 candidates for each and all oil block allocations and other major government contracts and a public televised lottery to determine the ultimate winners.  (Maybe set up special government TV channel for this)

Same process for nominating EFCC head and free up/encourage career government prosecutors/lawyers and detectives to build their careers and reputation pursuing and taking down corruption.

Key is to reduce the discretion of the president (and extend to governors) to unilaterally create wealthy individuals without specific enterprise and to remove prosecution of corruption from political influence as much as possible.

Total Transparency: all government credits and debits to be publicly and transparently displayed online in real time (as alerts on public dashboards for all to monitor, critique, comment and otherwise review). Every single spend must be public and online with full disclosure of: to who, and for what, and of course how much. Introduction of Structural and institutionalized Transparency will be the biggest disinfectant to corruption (and this is easily and readily achievable with today’s technology). Not reliance on self-proclaimed “honest” messiahs

Health: Rapid deployment of technology to incorporate telemedicine into basic health care – beginning perhaps with leveraging the Wi-Fi to be deployed with the solar powered e-learning platform to be deployed to every single secondary school and perhaps primary school.

Continuity:

Continuity of good existing government programmes.  – break the jinx and waste of good programmes becoming orphaned by succeeding administrations.  My government would adopt and boost/specifically (i) the Dangote refinery because of its transformative potential (irrespective of any other consideration) and (ii) the current Rural electrification programme under the current VP’s office which is largely solar power driven.