Muhammadu Buhari has taken small steps towards fulfilling his pledge to increase expenditure on education by 50 per cent between 2022 and 2023.
The global event saw Mr Buhari committing to increase Nigeria’s annual domestic education expenditure by 50 per cent over the next two years and by 100 per cent by 2025, beyond the 20 per cent global benchmark. Based on Mr Buhari’s promise three months ago in the UK, a 50 per cent increase from this year’s N742.5 billion would take the allocation to N1.11 trillion; an indication that next year’s allocation to education increased by more than 50 per cent compared to last year’s.Though the president pushed this year’s allocation a notch higher than he promised by giving N1.
As the presidential candidate of the defunct Congress for Progressive Change , Mr Buhari in October 2010 presented a paper tagged “Education Stakeholders in Free, Fair and Credible Elections: My Programme for the Rescue of Education,” to the Joint Education Stakeholders Action Coalition in Abuja. However, since becoming president, his highest allocation to the education sector is 7.9 per cent of the budget, a far cry from the 15 to 20 per cent UNESCO recommended for nations like Nigeria.
A further breakdown showed that N174.3 billion was allocated for capital expenditure for the ministry while N662.7 billion and N38.8 billion were earmarked for personnel and overhead costs, which sums up the recurrent expenditure.