Pick your Poison: Economy or Education

Picture the finance minister sitting down to build next year's budget. There is one pot of money and two lines of people at the door. In one line are teachers who haven't been paid a living wage, doctors who trained abroad and aren't coming back, and parents asking why their children sit on the floor in overcrowded classrooms. In the other line are commuters stuck for hours on a road that floods every rainy season, businesses that can't move goods because the bridge is out, and a city that hasn't had a reliable water system in a decade. The minister has enough money to make real progress on one line. Whichever one gets ignored will be loud about it within the year. This is the trade-off at the heart of almost every developing economy, and it rarely gets discussed honestly. The popular line is that human capital grows an economy, so a government simply needs to invest in education and health and growth will follow. That's true in the long run. It's also almost useless as guidance, because it skips past the actual constraint: governments don't have unlimited money, and every naira spent on one priority is a naira not spent on another. Pour resources into schools and hospitals, and people will rightly ask why the roads are falling apart. Pour resources into roads and power, and people will rightly ask why teachers are underpaid and hospitals are understaffed. It is a genuine catch-22, and pretending otherwise doesn't make it less real. Why you can't just "invest in people"The case for human capital is real. It's just slow. Training a doctor takes roughly a decade from the start of medical school through specialization. Building a health system that actually functions, with staffed clinics, reliable supply chains, and trained personnel, is a multi-year, multi-million-dollar undertaking. Education compounds even more slowly. A child who enters a better-funded primary school today doesn't show up in the labor market as a more productive worker for another fifteen or twenty years. Meanwhile, the price tag is steep. Global guidance puts the target for education spending at 15 to 20 percent of the national budget, and the African Union's own Abuja Declaration asks member states to commit at least 15 percent of the national budget to health. Put those together and you're talking about roughly a third of everything a government spends, on two sectors, before a single road gets paved. Most African governments, Nigeria included, fall well short. Nigeria's 2025 budget put just 7 percent toward education, trailing not just the global benchmark but regional peers. In the same budget, debt servicing alone consumed 45 percent of government revenue, more than the combined allocations for education, health, security, and infrastructure. That's less a prioritization failure than a fiscal straitjacket. You cannot fund a generation's education out of a budget that's already spoken for by creditors. Why you can't just "grow the economy first" eitherThe alternative pitch, focus on the economy now and reinvest the proceeds into people later, has its own trap. Building an economy wealthy enough to self-fund world-class schools and hospitals is a multi-decade project. If you spend those decades starving human capital while you wait for growth to show up, you don't just delay progress. You lose an entire generation of young people who age out of school and into an economy that has no place for them. That's not a hypothetical. It's the story of a country with tens of millions of unemployed and underemployed young people who were never adequately prepared for the jobs that do exist, becoming both an economic drag and, over time, a genuine security risk. So neither path works cleanly on its own. Underfund people, and you build a underclass. Underfund infrastructure and industry, and you never generate the revenue to fund people properly in the first place. It really is damned if you do, damned if you don't, at least if you insist on choosing one side of the debate. The way through is sequencing, not choosingThe honest answer isn't economy versus education. It's recognizing that you don't have enough resources to do everything at once, and that the smarter move is to sequence investments so that early wins fund the later, more expensive ones. Here's a logical order for how that could work in a resource-constrained environment like Nigeria's: 1. Chase quick wins in revenue first. Tighten tax administration, shore up levies and land use charges, and close collection gaps. Nearly everything downstream, teacher salaries, clinic budgets, textbooks, medical equipment, depends on how much money actually lands in government accounts. Revenue is the input that makes every other step possible. 2. Push growth through the private sector. Blended-finance vehicles and industry funds that channel capital to private businesses grow the tax base indirectly. As businesses scale and hire, government revenue rises through personal income tax, consumption tax, and corporate tax, without government having to fund that growth directly out of its own thin budget. 3. In education, hold the line on basic schooling and let industry fund vocational training. With a limited education budget, keep government spending on primary and secondary education stable rather than cutting it, while offering incentives for the private sector to finance vocational and technical training. These programs have far shorter timelines than a full K-12 pipeline and feed workers directly into industries that need them, solving an employability problem today rather than in fifteen years. 4. In health, treat medical tourism as a funding bridge, not a substitute. Identify the procedures where a country can realistically compete globally (cosmetic and dental procedures are a proven category) and invest in bringing local clinics up to international accreditation standards, then market those services abroad. It isn't a hypothetical. Turkey built roughly $3 billion a year in medical tourism revenue, with hair transplants and aesthetic procedures alone forming the single largest segment of that market, largely by combining price efficiency, a highly trained medical workforce, and aggressive global positioning. The tax revenue generated from that kind of sector can be recycled into the broader health system over time. 5. Import high-level managerial and entrepreneurial talent instead of waiting to train it. Every advanced economy still recruits skilled talent from abroad, because growing your own pipeline of people who can start and scale large businesses takes far longer than the moment demands. China offers the clearest precedent. When it opened its special economic zones in the late 1970s, it didn't wait a generation to build its own managerial class from scratch. Deng Xiaoping described the zones explicitly as "a window of technology, a window of management, a window of knowledge," and the capital and expertise that poured in came heavily from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese business networks already fluent in running large enterprises. That imported expertise trained the first generation of Chinese managers and entrepreneurs, who then trained the next one. A country doesn't need to invent that class internally if it can import the first wave and let local capacity grow around it. 6. Let the vocational and skilled workforce plug into the businesses that imported talent builds. As experienced operators create and scale companies, they need workers, and a vocationally trained labor force is ready to be absorbed into that growth. More businesses, more employment, more tax revenue, which flows back into education and health, closing the loop the outline started with. There’s really no poison to pickThe framing in the title is the trap. There is no version of this where a government simply picks a side and wins. The real skill is sequencing: find the fastest possible wins in revenue and private sector growth, use them to fund targeted, shorter-timeline investments in employability, and let that momentum build toward the slower, more expensive work of transforming schools and hospitals at scale. Industry and the tax revenue it generates isn't in competition with human capital investment. It's the mechanism that eventually pays for it. The finance minister at the start of this essay was never actually choosing between two lines at the door. The job was figuring out which line to shorten first so there'd be enough in the account to eventually clear both.

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