Someone should invite Microsoft founder Bill Gates to Malumfashi, in Katsina State. Though he has tons and tons of money, I still think the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation could do with some out-sourcing to cut costs, and the current executives of Malumfashi Local Government are just the right people to give them that.

By outsourcing some of its services, the Foundation would be helping some of Africa's poor. The service I am referring to is male circumcision. In a nutshell, Gates' Foundation is budgeting US 50,000,000 dollars to circumcise 650,000 Africans, and media reports indicate that Malumfashi LGA could do that for a pittance. Or, for much less than US$43,000!!

But first a brief background. Research findings show significant correlation between male circumcision and lower incidence of HIV in a population. Though disputed by some, most global health actors are convinced. Consequently, The World Health Organization (WHO), US Centres for Disease Control (CDC), among a host of others, recommended voluntary circumcision as part of HIV prevention programs, in addition to other prevention strategies, namely using condoms and becoming educated as to what causes HIV and how it is spread. In 2008, focusing on Kenya, the Gates' Foundation donated US$18.5 million to establish the Male Circumcision Consortium (MCC), a partnership with the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and EngenderHealth, an international NGO. The CDC's National HIV Prevention Conference held last August in Atlanta even discussed whether to recommend routine circumcision for all baby boys to protect them from the disease. Some felt the evidence was not sufficiently compelling to justify such a drastic change in the USA, thus the meeting was split in its recommendations. Globally however, the groundswell of opinion supported some sort of universal circumcision policy.

Donor funding from USAID, WHO, the Gates' Foundation and others, is now flowing into Africa, which helps to explain the Malumfashi circumcision drive. Last week, the Abuja-based People's Daily, the Lagos Punch, and a host of other papers carried identical write-ups, obviously from the wire services, to the effect that 400,000 children are to be circumcised free of charge in Malumfashi Local Government Area. I was thoroughly confused and had to check again. Yes, the headline shouted 400,000 children. But wait a minute; the total population of that LGA is less than 185,000 people, both male and female. So what is happening? Reading the details, I noticed a more likely figure of 40,000 children. The two papers had identical figures, so the mistake could be from the original press release, copied and sent out by the news agency without anyone bothering to even read it. Yet even 40,000 seems ridiculous because the total male population is under 95,000, so, unless all the children born in the last 15 years (about 40,000) were never circumcised ( a very unlikely scenario for a predominantly Muslim population) I fail to see where they could round up such a large number. It is not at all surprising that the figures don't make sense, when we think about it. Voodoo statistics abound in this country, and every director-general, permanent secretary or minister seems eager to throw fake data and statistics at us, without any explanation on how they come about it, so perhaps we should not blame Chairman Dan-Yari, or his Primary Health Care Coordinator.

All the foregoing is just an aside. My main point is that the Gates' Foundation and other actors could outsource circumcision to Malumfashi, since they can do it cheaper. Since they are spending N400, 000 to cover 40,000 people, their cost is N10 per person, as against the Gates' Foundation's N11,770. So, if the target of 650,000 Africans is contracted to Malumfashi LGA, they can send out their experts and finish the job in 3-4 months at less than US$5 million at most, leaving them with an operating surplus of over US$45 million, or N6.885 billion. How about that for internally generated revenue drive?

On a more serious note, must external donor-agencies dictate our development agenda? Has Malumfashi abandoned circumcision that they need to resort to government funds to circumcise their boys? Maybe they have solved all other pressing health issues like child mortality, maternal mortality and malaria and now want to use free money pay to for this one. Was the project even properly scoped?

Kpakol's back-of-the-envelop calculations

Yet even the Malumfashi case fades to insignificance after listening to our job creation expert. When Magnus Kpakol, Senior Special Adviser to the Nigerian President and Coordinator of the National Poverty Eradication Programme, said neither the illness of President Yar'adua, nor constant power outage, nor even the low performance of the economy, affect his war against poverty, and that poverty has declined in the country, I thought he was just plain confused. In his talk with Daily Trust about a week ago, he was adamant that "The poverty rate has dropped because for example if you look at the economy, and look at what happens in say agriculture, you will realise that there is growth in the sector last year and that growth in output means something happened there. If you look across board, you will see that the overall GDP growth rate in the economy grew by about 6.9%.All of that growth took place in the non-oil sector where you have people getting jobs."

Is this guy failing to understand and refusing to even listen, cocooned in his comfortable fiction? Even the World Bank, the IMF and others not known to be usually worried about the fate of the poor before now, have pointed out time and time again, that Nigeria's development model does not lead to growth of jobs or to a reduction in poverty, and are advising us to change our approach. Why is he adamant in his preferred fiction? Listen to him again:"If between 1999 and 2004, that is 5 years the poverty rate dropped 16 points, it is not unreasonable to think that in another 5 years, the poverty rate couldn't have dropped more than 4 points. As an economist, doing the back of envelop calculations, I know at the back of my mind that unless we change the yardstick that we use in measurement, the poverty rate will be under 50%." No, Kpakol, there is no reason under the sun for us to believe that just because poverty rate has declined over some past period, then it must continue this decline in future. In addition, non-governmental estimates put last year's growth rate at 2.9% (see IMF Country Report for example), and not the 6.9% you prefer to cite.

Anyway, we shall await the National Bureau of Statistics' report that Kpakol promises, which is expected to come up this year, and then we can examine his claims. Hope it is not another example of the usual voodoo stats, on a higher plane than the much simpler Malumfashi one.