Good and bad spendings

It's well known that spending is a crucial part of life and everyone at one point or another has had a reason to spend but sometimes, we tend to abuse it and end up making bad financial decisions. This problem is not restricted to individuals alone and I have seen it a couple of times done by the government of my country which sometimes leaves me in a state of "why?".

My country is still struggling with a lot of things and in the midst of that, we are still faced with problems of misappropriation and mismanagement of funds by politicians who with the aim of appearing relevant end up throwing money into useless endeavors and projects, meanwhile there are more crucial things they should spend on, like...

Education

Higher institutions in my country have been going on strike for decades and it has mainly been for one major reason; poor funding in the education sector. We can also say that the staff of the higher institutions who are the initiator of the incessant strikes are doing it for their own selfish reasons but we can't ignore the fact that some of their requests are for the improvement of the standard of education.

It's not surprising that countries that invest more in education are very successful. Take a look at Norway for example, they invest a substantial portion of their budget into education, and today, they are one of the most prosperous countries in the world with a strong economy and high standard of living. The same can be said for countries like Switzerland, Canada, South Korea, and some others, they all invest a lot into their education.

But here in my country, the government doesn't pay much attention to education and instead focuses on frivolities like building a wooden bridge with millions of dollars, embarking on school feeding programs that we only read in newspapers, and yes, redesigning the currency (I will get to that later). Last year during one of the legendary ASUU strikes, I was at home because schools were shut down and I ended up taking a virtual course with Harvard University.

Even though the classes were held online through zoom, I was still amazed at the very modern lecture theater. Most things that were taught by the professor were illustrated on a projector screen and there were up to 4 different screens of various sizes. I had no problem keeping up with the class even though I wasn't there physically. That's a country that invests a lot into its education sector; the United States of America.

What they shouldn't spend on

I mentioned earlier that I will speak more on something and now that we are here, I will like to go ahead and thrash out that issue; naira redesign. The central bank of Nigeria (CBN) just woke up one morning and decided without thinking that they are going to redesign some of the currency and their reason was that they are trying to control inflation and some speculated hidden agenda was that they are trying to stop politicians from buying votes during the recently concluded presidential election.

But guess what? Both of those plans failed miserably. Few weeks after the new currency was released (did I forget to mention they spent billions to do this?), Inflation increased and during the presidential election, vote buying still happened. The entire new currency policy was a colossal failure and it looks like a plan that was hurriedly implemented without much thinking.

What made things worse was that they tried to remove the old currency from circulation and at the same time, release only a few amounts of the new currency which was supposed to be the replacement (their idea of fighting inflation) but in the end, it brought unnecessary hardship on everyone. People had to stay in the queue for hours just to withdraw their money from banks and sometimes, it might get to your turn and the next thing you will hear from the bank cashier is "we have run out of cash".

Some people lost their lives because of that policy and I should mention again that their spent billions doing this but in the end, the CBN ended up releasing the old notes which they initially removed from circulation. So now, what was the point of the whole thing? They ended up wasting money, time, and lives just because they want to redesign the currency. The country was obviously not ready for the effects of that policy, there are a lot of things that the government should have worked on before thinking about going cashless which was also one of the reasons behind the naira redesign.

Going cashless will in turn reduce inflation in the long run but as I said earlier, they are a couple of things that should be worked on before that can happen. Things like stable electricity and internet connection, making sure all bank apps have huge bandwidth that can handle multiple transactions, reduced transaction charges, availability of banks in rural areas, and some other factors to consider before deciding to go cashless. But did they do that? No, they just woke up one morning and spent billions on redesigning the naira.

Thanks for reading

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