By Sunday Ani
Assessing President Bola Tinubu’s one year in office, a businessman and presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo has said that democracy was yet to take roots in Nigeria. He likened democracy in Nigeria to a student who wants to study medicine and is required to do pre-medicine first, so that if he makes the right grades, then he can start the study of medicine.
In this interview, he looked at President Tinubu’s performance after 365 days in office, the economic challenges facing the country arising from fuel subsidy removal and other economic decisions of the current government as well as how to deepen Nigeria’s democracy, among others.
On May 29, President Bola Tinubu will clock one year in office as president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, what is your honest assessment of his performance so far?
First, I’m one of the few Nigerians who are not disappointed. I’m also one of the few Nigerians that are not surprised. So, I’m in the position of a doctor, monitoring a diabetic patient who has some issues with breathing but who is first to take the highest amount of sugar and who smokes like a chain smoker. So, if I see that patient still alive after three years, I am pleasantly surprised. If the patient is a little sick, I will not be surprised. So, when we were running for president, we did not only talk about ourselves, what we will do as Social Democratic Party (SDP) and what I will do as president. I also said what the country would look like if you voted for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) after 16 years or the APC after eight years. I also spoke about what you will get ideologically if you voted for the Labour Party (LP), which I saw as a branch of the PDP at that time. So, to be honest, I am personally not disappointed and I’m not agitated at all. I’m rather pleasantly surprised that the country is not worse than this.
So, I am not joining in the wailing and all the complaints because I studied the nitty-gritty of what it will mean to be president, and Commander in Chief. I knew the kind of decisions that will have to be taken and the consequences of the decisions. So far so good, there are five things I can say. One is that President Tinubu has not disappointed me at all, and maybe, the voters will have to convince me if they can say he has disappointed them because he hasn’t deviated much from what he said he was going to do. He’s doing them almost like somebody following a playbook of how he’s going to do it, so I cannot say I’m disappointed. He’s a politician who keeps his words and he’s been keeping his words. So, it’s not like, oh, he was promising something else and when he came in, he started doing some other thing else. He’s doing exactly what he said he would do and if you also follow his governance record as Lagos governor for eight years, that’s exactly what he’s doing now.
Secondly, the consequences of the policies he’s adopting now are not even as severe as they would have been if someone else was doing them. So, the drastic policies that they adopted and the drastic and desperate consequences of the policies are consistent with environment such decisions have been taken.
Third, the reason I am not disappointed is because it appears as if the majority of the decisions he has taken has been along the line of carrying along the three arms of government. There’s no push back by the National Assembly, no push back by the judiciary and no serious push back by the civil society. So, it looks to me like his decisions are popular, even though they are inconvenient. In terms of lost opportunities, yes of course, they were well understood that when you make a decision, there are opportunity costs. So, the decisions President Tinubu is taking are consistent with the decisions that were taken earlier by the electorate one way or the other, that we have become what we call opportunity cost in democracy. We are the options not followed, and the option now is to hand over the power to a Bola Tinubu to act as President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Nigeria.
As a democrat, I’m not disappointed. I only occasionally get moved by humanity. Occasionally, the humanity of it affects me when I see all other options we could have taken. For instance, if you look at the national problem that we say we are trying to solve, it’s like someone who says that he wants to have cleaner teeth, so you go to a dentist. It’s a laudable objective. But, if he has to sell his kidney to pay the dentist, you might wonder if that is a wise decision. Why would you have to sell something more important in order to just have cleaner teeth?
At this juncture, what do you think are the short, medium and long-term things that we need to be looking at to take us to the place where we probably should be?
First, we should know that governance is more important than politics. Politics is the way through which we do exams to select the best candidate, but the candidate has to do the job. So, I don’t want us to be like America. It is not everything that America is doing that is good. Let’s not be a democracy of perpetual politics, where you end one election, somebody is sworn in and politics starts that day. No, we should learn that governance is important and governance has three branches. Those we have elected, or those that have been declared elected are the government. So, we the people must give them support whether we agree with their policy or not, we owe them that basic support. We must continue to recognise the government of our country. Don’t say the government is illegitimate and go against it, because somehow, there ought to be a government. After all, when we had the British ruling us, they were white skinned with a different religion, and we didn’t invite them but we still obeyed the law and we still paid taxes to them. When the military came and was in government, even though nobody invited them, we still managed to attend the universities that they created. So, now that we are choosing our own civilian government, even if you don’t like the candidate because you don’t think he is a perfect person, you need to obey the law of the land, pay your taxes, and cooperate.
Next to that is that we need to be critical of the government; we need to be critical of policies; we need to analyse policies and be critical of them, and some of us who are in leadership need to provide alternatives because for everything that we are doing, there is an alternative. Even from the name we call Nigeria, there are alternatives before we settled on Nigeria at Independence. We are looking for alternative names; we have an alternative system of government compared to parliamentary, presidential and all of that. We also have alternatives to political parties. You don’t have to be APC all the time. Even in governance policy, like the subsidy removal, there are more than 10 alternatives to subsidy removal. The methods of running our financial system have alternatives. The way we do our budgets has alternatives. People like us will continue to remind Nigerians of the alternatives. And we remind them by also defending the alternatives as much as the government is defending what they are doing.
And occasionally, like the clock, however bad the battery mechanism is, the clock will be right at least once a day. When occasionally the government does what is right, we have to say it is right. Let us support what the government is doing and say this is right. Then, we also have to define government more in a deeper way. We have to define the government to include not just Tinubu and his cohorts in the Federal Executive Council. Government also includes the people we elect into the House of Representatives. Recently, people invited me to come and criticise President Tinubu regarding the cyber security levy and I asked why. I am not a Tinubu critic. I want to be president, so why do I jump to criticise Tinubu? He didn’t pass the law. Your representatives passed the law. The media carried the news of the law when it was passed. So, if you don’t want the levy, stop talking about Tinubu. Just tell every member of the House of Representatives and senators representing you that within 48 hours, they must repeal that law. So, the government is not only one person. It’s a good thing that the president has suspended the operation of the levy, but the way the government works is that you must ensure that if you are against that levy as I am against it; you need to let the House of Representatives member and your Senators go there now and repel the law. If the law is repealed, there will be no levy to pay. So, we need to have a deeper understanding of our government. At the same time, I am an SDP and in my political party, when the government brings a policy and we are discussing the good or bad side of the policy. I always ask my party people how the elected SDP members voted. That is because I don’t want us to look very silly to go and start opposing something which our members voted for. So, if we don’t like this policy and we can recall our members who are in the House, summon them for questioning, to say this law or this regulation or this resolution is contrary to the objective of the SDP and the principle for which we stand. So, the way you should vote should not be in agreement with it, so if we do it that way, then we will be consistent. You will see that in Nigeria today, PDP and its presidential candidate will come on air to criticise the present government for implementing policies which the PDP passed into law when it was there. So, there is a kind of inconsistency in the way we structure our democracy. We need to strengthen it and broaden it.
You mentioned alternatives to subsidy removal, and leadership selection; can you throw more light on that?
First, let’s start with subsidies. I always want to run away from looking like I’m campaigning again after losing the election. I am still campaigning in my head but I will just paraphrase that. What we said was that the main problem with subsidy was the amount of money from the budget that was being used in the name of subsidy. So, fiscally it means that with the revenue coming in and the amount of expenditure this government was making, we were exceeding our income to the point where they were even saying that they were borrowing money to fund the subsidy.
It started with the NNPC, our cash cow, saying that they were going bankrupt because they were using their earnings to pay for subsidy and because of that, they were not paying money to the federation account and because the tiers of government rely on the money coming to the federation account, they too were having shortfalls. So, they now said, okay, where is the money going? But, they conveniently didn’t mention the amount of money we are spending fighting Boko Haram, that’s in trillions. They didn’t want to talk about that, but they talked about the money we spent on subsidies.
Of course, we were spending other money on tax rebates for the so-called pioneer industries and all of that, and we were giving tax waivers to so many people. And of course, there were loose areas in revenue collection and a lot of concessions we had given out also through which we are losing money and many other swaps we have done. We didn’t talk about that. They specifically talked about the money we spend on subsidies and it was going from N600 billion to N840 billion at the time. It was costing N1 trillion at some other time, and they were even saying it’s going to reach N2.7 trillion. And if you appear on Arise TV, they have their journalists already waiting with the question of what you people are doing about subsidy. If you go on Channels, it’s there waiting for you. You go on NTA, AIT, it’s there waiting for you. So, the elite in the government and their friends in the media will confront you every day with that question. If you have a meeting with any multilateral organisation, IMF, or World Bank, they will ask you questions on subsidy. But, we refused to be blackmailed by that, and I said the solution is to audit it first. Find out truly if volumetrically, the amount of money you are spending on subsidy is for subsidy, for petrol used by Nigerians. Until you know that, you cannot know the amount you are spending on subsidies.
Secondly, when you know that, then you cut down on the waste. Then, you phase subsidy out by doing what we call a shift in economies. Travelling along the curve, you cannot escape it. So, you cannot use differences, you use shift and say okay, who are the people consuming this petrol? I know that if petrol is 3,000 per litre, Pastor Itoha will not miss his church service; he will go and buy the fuel. Somebody riding okada or keke or a taxi driver, can say I cannot afford it and say the increment of fuel is why transport fare is going up.
This increment will shift people away from using petrol. You will say mass transit will not use petrol. So, instead of petrol, the present government is now doing CNG, although they are doing it slowly. It’s a good thing that they are doing that now. Former President Buhari passed the Petroleum Industry Act, and said by 2023 June we would stop funding subsidies. They passed the 2022 budget or Appropriation Act, and said they will not fund the subsidy. What I would have done is to expand the time and make sure that within that short time you are taking the people away from subsidised petrol, which means that if you are working in any city, you have access to transportation. The subsidy removal or whatever is not going to affect your ability to commute around. Those are the alternatives that we found, but we also told them that unless you govern public finance very well, the subsidy thieves who are in the government, in the banks and in the petroleum industry, will also move to another product because when you have arbitrage, whether it’s in foreign exchange, whether it is in pricing of a product, whether it’s in subsidy, people will exploit it.
So, even if you save money from subsidies and take it to the education trust fund, they will still follow you there. So, the long and short of what I am saying is that I oppose the removal of subsidy on the basis that it won’t solve the problem because the problem was not the subsidy itself, it was the fraud being done in the subsidy. So, just like you have a school feeding programme, it is not the amount spent on the school feeding programme that kills you, it is the fraud by the people doing the school feeding programme. Just like you have amnesty programme, it is not a fraud, it’s not the amount you give to the ex-militants, it is the fraud because the ex militant who was 18 years old will be 30 years old by now, but there are still militants that continue to spend the money, so, it doesn’t make any sense. So, it is not the amount of money you spend in chasing Shekarau, the Boko Haram that is killing you, it is the fraud where military officers are becoming billionaires out of it. So, it’s not programmatic; it’s not like if I change from this programme, then the fraud ends.
No, so those are options but they have already beaten the bullet now and if you look at the biting of the bullet, two things they have done. If people have taken the pain of subsidy removal but the subsidy is still there because when I did the analyses of government spending and NNPC, they are still subsidising petrol as we speak now. So, if the government says SDP was wrong, Adebayo was wrong, we should not continue to do the subsidy but they are still doing it now except that they succeeded in the price increase and they succeeded in creating a lot of crisis of cost of living, cost of doing business, inflation and hyperinflation.
Inflation now is about 34 percent officially and that is bulk buying inflation but if you take sector by sector, you do a disambiguation of the inflation, food inflation is about 100 percent. And if you take inflation of rent and other things; the long and short of all of this is that there are many alternatives even as we speak today. There are alternatives with subsidies, but they don’t sound easy to get away with.
How do you see the state of democracy and the election process in Nigeria today; and are there ways by which we can improve those things and get them a bit better?
My impression of our democracy is that democracy is yet to come. What we are having are attempts towards democracy. So, we are like somebody who wants to study medicine and is doing pre-med. So, if they make the right grades, then they can start medicine. We are like those days, when they used to have A-levels or higher school. You do your HSC1 and HSC 2 because you want to enter university. From 1999 till now, we have been in civilian rule, but we have not managed to enter into democracy because democracy is not a permanent state. It is the presence of certain dynamics. Even a previous democratic state can slide away from democracy. So, the tools of democracies are not complete and that’s how I see it. One is that the power is still not flowing from the people yet. For two reasons: the psychological self disempowerment by the people where they don’t recognise that they are the ones forming the government and that the government is their servant. They are commissioning an agent to work for them. They still have this monarchical, dictatorial system, where they think the people in government are their rulers and their leaders, or their owners.
Secondly, people don’t want to take responsibility for making choices in a democracy. And to make choices in a democracy, you need to know the issues at stake, and to make your choice of leadership based on where you stand on these issues. So, it requires continuous education. That’s for the people. They have to own the government.
Again, the political parties have to arise from the people. The political parties today are even less democratic than the NGOs. A man and his wife, a man and his friend, a man alone can form a political party and be the chairman; do whatever he likes and sell candidature up and down. A political party will collect from one person who wants to be the candidate of that party more than the money contributed by 99 percent of their members. So, you know that these political parties don’t exist and it’s not only the small political parties; even the big political parties are involved. You see, when PDP members have arguments among themselves, one Governor will say I single handedly sponsored this party. I gave so and so billions to the chairman of the party. I did this and that and that. So, that’s why the governors are very strong in the parties whether it’s PDP or APC. It’s like that.
If you see the catharsis and crisis you find in a Labour Party which is a small party, you will see that it has to do with where the money is coming from. If you look at the struggle we have in the SDP, the struggle is how to make sure that our members actually fund the party and that the party is owned by them. They make contributions to the party and the party is now a democratic party and the national working committee, chairman, secretary, and all the other people in the party are paid their salaries and allowances. They are your servants and they work for you, but now it is not so. So, the political parties need to work on that because to say you are discussing how to broaden democracy but I forgot about the people and I forgot about political parties, you have not started.