Myth or Reality?

Nigeria is rich, there fore we should be enjoying! Nigeria has oil, so petrol must be cheap! Nigeria has money, so education should be free!!

Are these statements really true!? Or are they myths? Does Nigeria realy have all that much money and are we really all that rich?

A recent headline comes to mind. I was reading the news on yahoo, I think, and there was a report that University tuiton fees in the UK (for british citizens) were being proposed to rise from about £3,500 to about £5,000 and I wondered....."I thought education in the UK was free"!? After all that is what we tend to hear, as an reason for why it should be free here in Nigeria. I don't know what you think, but £3,500 doesn't sound free to me!!

The per capita GDP of the UK is about $40,000, while that of Nigeria, if the official figures are anything to go by, is just about $2,300. Wait a minute, is that right!? How can a country that earns so much be charging tuition fees of £3,500, while a country that earns so little (despite having oil), be charging £100 (GBP equivalent of about N25,000- private universities charge about 15 to 20 times that)? You would have thought the richer country should be able to afford to make its education free!!

But if these are the facts, can we expect a £500 education to equate to a £3,500 one? Is it possible!? Do I hear you say "......but Nigeria has oil"? True as this may be, lets compare our per capita GDP with a few other oil producing nations. Nigeria-$2,300; Qatar-$103,000; Kuwait-$57,400; Norway-$55,200; UAE-$40,000; Saudi Arabia-$20,700; Libya- $14,400 and Angola-$8,800.

So is Nigeria really rich after all!?

A good question to ask would be..."are countries rich because their citizens are well educated, or their citizens are well educated because their countries are rich..?"

The thinking that Nigeria is a rich country is a major problem we seem to have. The years of plenty have blinded us the the fact that all said and done, Nigeria is not really that rich, and that the country cannot really afford to give all its citizens as much free this and free that as we might like. Corruption is a factor. If corruption could be brought down to western levels, no doubt we would all have significantly better standards of living, but like I said before, all said and done, Nigeria isn't really that rich!!

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html