The candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 presidential election, Prince Adewole Adebayo speaks on transparency in government, ‘return’ of the fuel subsidy and other issues. SUBAIR MOHAMMED brings the excerpts:
IT is also on record that new presidential jets were discreetly purchased but for the seizure by the Chinese firm, Nigerians wouldn’t have known about it. This brings to mind the issue of transparency in governance especially in the light of the return of payment of fuel subsidy, what’s your take on this?
There are many things to pack in there. First, permit me to disagree with those who said that President Bola Tinubu is not responsible for problems inherited from former President Buhari’s administration. I would rather take the words of President Tinubu himself who said that he would continue from where Buhari stopped. So, whatever any other person or apologist is saying is not as important as what Tinubu said as a matter of presidential policy that he was going to continue where Buhari stopped. And he was influential in Buhari’s government; he was influential in the policy and he has now inherited it and carried on with it, so let us rest that once and for all.
In addition, the issue of belt tightening in an economy is not a problem at all. Belt-tightening is required but what the All Progressives Congress (APC) government has done, especially President Tinubu, is to tighten the belt around the people’s neck. If you are tightening the belt around the waist, that could be a waist trainer and they can tell you how to consume less. But you cannot tighten the belt around the neck of the people in which case they will not be able to breathe. The things that are going up for the poor are the things which are not discretionary.
In finance, especially public finance, there is something we call discretionary spending. They are spending that you elect whether to spend or not. So, in the microeconomics of a family, whether to have food is not discretionary; you need to have food. Whether to have basic energy to live in a modern world, electricity to give you light and power your cooking and all of that is not discretionary, even though one of the ministers was of the view that they are discretionary. The other thing you need to know is that educating your children and tending to their healthcare needs are not discretionary. None of these things is discretionary, and that is where they are tightening the belt. That is why it is almost unconstitutional the way they are running the government. Now when it comes to economic choices, the things that the government is spending money on are things that are discretionary. So, if a person is being told to be discretionary regarding how much food he consumes, how he educates his children, whether he will go to the hospital or just pray over his headache, you are asking a person to do that, then you are purchasing an aircraft and other things, which might be necessary for you to use but there is more discretion in that one. There is more discretion in whether you purchase that presidential aircraft or not than if somebody who has two children is going to buy a loaf of bread for them or not. That is where the economic injustice comes in but my major disagreement with the government is that they are not governing.
The government is not governing at all. They are occupying powerful positions but they are not doing the job of those positions. How will you know that? You will know that by the pervasive insecurity in the country. It is with extreme sadness that I am talking to you because of the killing of the Emir of Gobir, Mohammed Bawa, who spent several weeks in kidnappers’ den. This was a first class traditional ruler in Sokoto State who was on official assignment. He was invited by the government to attend a meeting and on his way from the meeting, he was kidnapped. He was kept in captivity for a long time and was eventually killed. And I am using him as a point of contact for so many other people who are facing this kind of marauding risks in the country.
What’s your thought on the direction and implementation of policies of the Tinubu administration; are they wrongly implemented or what?
The policies of this administration are wrong-headed and I have litigated that many times. Before and after the election, I have been consistent in saying that these policies are not good, not only for the APC, but they are also not good from the way the PDP presented them. They are not good the way the LP presented them. These policies are not good and now, we are coming to the realisation that these policies are not just good for us. They are not the right medicine for our kind of economic malaise. However, despite these, the government is quite cavalier and unserious. There can be a cabinet but they are not behaving like a government. You know that the tradition we had was that a party wins an election and forms a government thereafter, but winning an election does not automatically make you form a government. So, when Tinubu was sworn in on May 29, 2023 at the Eagle Square, he had not formed a government. And when he announced his cabinet members and sent them to the National Assembly and they got cleared, they had not started behaving like a government. But there are one or two ministers, for example interior and maybe the FCT ministers, that are doing quite well, behaving like a government, but the rest, I think with due respect, especially Finance, Budget and Planning, cannot be said to be in government. They are not husbanding the economy well.
Recently, a former presidential Spokesman was quoted as saying that Tinubu’s administration is engulfed in crisis of credibility and that as a man who became President with a narrow mandate of just 37 percent of votes cast, but instead of rising to establish an enduring legacies, he is displaying impunity; do you agree with this submission?
My own point of view is from the point of view of the government in terms of what the constitution expects of a government. When you are assessing the performance of any person, you need to use a metric that is as objective as possible. Nothing can be more consensual than the constitution by which the president was sworn into office and that constitution expects the government to be for the good, order and welfare of the people. I think it is not debatable even for those inside the government that the Tinubu administration cannot say that it has answers to the constitutional requirement of taking care of the people, governing the land in a way that is for the benefit of the people and ensuring that we have peace. We don’t have peace; we don’t have justice, we don’t develop and we don’t have economic relief, rather we have additional problems brought upon the people by the ideological decisions made by the APC government right from the former President Buhari administration up to President Tinubu’s era. So, we have nine and half years of wrong-headed policies by the APC, particularly the Tinubu’s presidency, a continuation of the APC has even worsened matters in many areas. It doesn’t mean that they don’t mean well, it just that the result has shown otherwise.
What would you do differently if you were president of Nigeria? How would you earn the trust and respect of Nigerians?
The respect of Nigerians is not difficult to earn. Nigerians are very generous people. However, the people must not be smarter than you. The average Nigerian at home is smarter than the government today because the government is not self-aware of the problems that people are facing. So, as a government, the first thing you show is empathy. You need to understand that you are governing for the people. You may be a businessman in your private life but what you are doing now is not business; you are running a government. So, in that case, the measurement of whether you are doing well or not, is how it reflects in the lives of the people and if you cannot help them immediately, you need to be at the same level with them to let them know that you know what they are going through. This government has failed in that one; that is number one. Then, number two is that in the long term, you must be able to realise that it is only by using the people to create wealth that the country is going to be wealthy. Having millions upon millions when people are out of job, especially the younger ones is not sensible at all. The third point you need to know is that the government alone cannot employ everybody and create all the wealth. Therefore, you have to make sure that the private sector does not fail. Nobody can tell me in this government that they don’t know that the private sector is collapsing, whether it is in manufacturing, services, agriculture, transport and mining, or whatever sector it is. So, they need to address that and also control the currency.
If the current administration is performing below the expectation of Nigerians, what alternative are you bringing to the table and what are your plans for the 2027 presidential race, are you running?
My priority now is to ensure that Nigerians don’t suffer and I will encourage the government to succeed; I don’t want them to fail. My intention is not to unseat them because they are already unseating themselves by their own efforts. So you don’t even need to unseat them because they are unseating themselves. But the task before us is not to think in terms of the next presidential election because between now and 2027 with the current trend, how many more people would have been kidnapped? How many more would have been dead of poverty; how many more industries would have collapsed and how many more opportunities would have been wasted? So, I am taking an attitude that is not hostile now; an attitude that is advisory to talk to them so that when I am appearing on broadcast and print media, they won’t say that the opposition has come again. I am talking to them like we are brothers. You are running the affairs of the country on our behalf, please you are not doing well, listen to us. There is no rocket science in what you are doing. The solutions to the country’s problems are there. Nigeria is a very wealthy country. Nigerians are very resourceful and hardworking. The people are cooperative and generous. So, you don’t abuse the kindness of the people and their patience.
For me, if I am giving the options of choosing between removing President Tinubu in 2027 and improving Tinubu in 2025, I would choose improving Tinubu in 2025 so that Nigerians don’t suffer and the country doesn’t go into doldrums. There are a lot of crises that are facing this country that we monitor which the government doesn’t seem to be aware of and that is what is worrisome. They need to wake up but come 2027; Nigeria will have a better choice to make than they have now.
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