An economy without Connection — Nigeria?
The structure of the world is built on interactions between the people of the world. For interactions to happen as planned, there are impediments that must be crossed, sometimes those impediments are natural, and other times man-made. The advancement of man has been focused on working to overcome these impediments. There are various impediments such as distance, languages, needs, and any other we might think of. Commerce has been one of the earliest forms of civilization humans ever considered, and it is still hugely important years later.
It might not be as obvious, but commerce is at the center of anything and everything in economics. A dated definition of commerce defines commerce as social dealings with people. So, facilitating these dealings are very important, and some of the greatest inventions of the 19th and 20th century bordered on improving commerce, such as the telegraph, the telephone, trains, bicycles, planes, and cars. These inventions are very critical to the explosions we have experienced in the astronomical growth of commerce worldwide.
There is a gentle and quiet service that has provided an important bedrock for the development and advancement of commerce in many of the top economies. These services are the National Postal Services. These services could operate at the nerve of transactions and commerce, despite the realities that many of the services have online. The ability to connect the extremes of a country together is on the back of the National Postal Services. Creating these channels creates opportunities for exchange and commerce. It is even a lot more exciting because, with the introduction of voice and data, the opportunity for postal services becomes wider.
This brings me to our beloved. Over time, there have been many attempts to drive economic advancement in the country, but over and over we have failed at this. Many theorists and essayist (like myself) have pondered why development seem elusive to us, despite having some good human resources in the country. The general consensus is that the country is quite weak on execution, but not planning. I think differently, because, for me, execution is part of planning, so a poor execution shows a poor plan. What if we have actually been planning wrongly too?
There are transactions today that having a post office would have facilitated. I am not sure the number of ATM cards currently at the Branches uncollected. Share Certificates, Bills, etc are activities that can be done to create opportunities to earn for the Post Services. Automating might be the way to go, but the government can keep some seemingly archaic regulations to keep the opportunities for the sector. This sector is a high employment creator, but somehow, a country with a huge unemployment number is not explored. I will share the numbers that National Postal Services of the top 10 economies and a couple from Africa employ.
My case here is for more robust National Postal Services, because there is no more efficient way to connect the nooks and crannies of Nigeria without a proper and effective postal service. I know there have been feeble attempts at rejigging the Service, but clearly, it has not delivered to a tenth of its potential. This is not to make a scathing attack on the management, but rather on the successive clear under-resourcing of the Service. The table below shows the investment in employee counts that the Top 10 Largest economies have made in their Postal Services. I have also provided information about employees per population and landmass.
Amongst the top 10 countries listed, India is clearly the only one that might be out of place due to the low comparably lower GDP per capita and HDIs. This might explain why they have the worst number of Postal Office employees versus the population. Yes, India has a high population, but they also have a high landmass. Despite these, India still has 4.7 times better resources per population than Nigeria. If we compare employees per landmass, the only country that appears worse is Canada. So, for context Canada is the largest country in the world, however, 80% of the country is not habitable.
In conclusion, as we are planning for economic growth and development, we must think and plan for the growth of the National Postal Services in Nigeria. The emphasis here is on National Postal Services because the population numbers provided for the other countries focus on just the National Postal Services. If we included private players like UPS, DHL, FedEx, Dpd, etc, then the employee count would still be more than we currently have.
Olamide shares his thought from Lagos.