Adebayo: Tinubu-led Govt Isn’t Leading by Example 

Prince Adewole Ebenezer Adebayo, the leader and presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, like many Nigerians, isn’t happy with the state of affairs of the country. He said in this interview that the President Bola Tinubu-led administration isn’t leading by example as it isn’t giving the needed direction, rather, members of the administration are living ostentatious lifestyles while advising the people to tighten their belts. He said the administration may be unseating itself by its unpopular policies and actions

Recently, Segun Adeniyi was quoted as saying that the Tinubu administration is facing a crisis of credibility and that as a man who got into office with the narrow mandate of just 37 per cent of votes cast, he should have risen above himself in order to establish enduring legacies but he is instead displaying impunity; do you agree with the submission?

Well, there are many perspectives when looking at a government and Adeniyi’s comment is valid from his own point of view. My own point of view is from assessing the government in terms of what the constitution expects of a government because 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 and 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 All Progressives Congress (APC) government right from the former President Muhammadu Buhari’s time up to President Tinubu’s. So, we have nine and a half years of wrong-headed policies by the APC, particularly the Tinubu’s presidency as a continuation of the APC has even worsened matters in many areas. It doesn’t mean that they don’t mean well, it’s just that the result has shown at all.

Talking about continuity, Tinubu’s people said they have just had one year, dissociating themselves from Buhari’s years. How about the fuel subsidy payment which is still ongoing even when the government told Nigerians that subsidy was gone? The new presidential aircraft was surreptitiously purchased but for the seizure by a Chinese firm, Nigerians wouldn’t have been informed about that. In other words, the issue of transparency in government is still a big problem, what is your take on that?  

Well, there are many things to pack in there. First of all, permit me with due respect to disagree with those who said that Tinubu is not responsible for any problems inherited from 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 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. Maybe, you shouldn’t have electricity when you go to work but he is still keeping his job. The other thing you need to know is that educating your children is not discretionary. When you catch a malaria fever here or typhoid or headache or whatever tropical disease that our people tend to have, it is not discretionary, whether you should go to a dispensary, a pharmacy or a hospital to take care of yourself. So, these things are not discretionary; like when you get a job, you need to travel to your job. So, you need energy, you need petrol or diesel to commute to work. If you are a trader, you need to carry your goods to the point of sale. 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. If 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. And how will you know that? You will know that by the pervasive insecurity in the country. It is with extreme sadness; if you notice my voice, 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 the hands of kidnappers. This is a first class traditional ruler in Sokoto State of all places 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. There was a video of him in circulation, the kidnappers were negotiating with his family and there was no sign that there was a government anywhere. 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.

You made quite a number of points, but do you think like some people do that the policy choices that Tinubu is making are wrong? Or do you think the problem is with the cavalier way that they are being implemented, as you pointed out that the government officials continue to display ostentatious lifestyles?

It is both. The policies are wrong-headed and I have litigated that many times. Before the election 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 Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presented them. They are not good the way the Labour Party (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, the government itself on top of that is quite cavalier and unserious. And in the classical sense in which we evaluate the government, it will seem that it is not a government properly so called. There can be a cabinet but they are not behaving like a government. You know that the tradition we had was that your party will win an election and form a government after that, 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 saying honestly that they are in government. They are not husbanding the economy well. 

What would you do differently if you were president of Nigeria today? 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, the first thing you show is empathy. You need to understand that you are governing for the people. It may be businessmen in your private lives 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 realize that it is only by using the people to create wealth that the country is going to be wealthy. Having millions upon millions of people 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. Then you need to control your currency. If you are losing the control of your own currency and you are not able to retain value in the currency, the number one instrument for fighting poverty is the naira. If the naira can retain value, if you can work and retire on the naira, if you can work in January and use the savings of January to take care of yourself for Christmas in the same year, then that naira is working but that is not what is going on now. If you look at the sense of respect for the sensibility of the people, that is not going on now because people are getting angry. People are annoyed that you are living a very large life; you are showing that maybe you are living the way you live ordinarily. In my private life now, the way I am living is not the way I am going to live when I become president. I am going to step down because right now I am spending my own money, I can live my life the way I want because I work for my money. But when I become president, I have to live like the people, step down and show that I am stepping down. And long term, your policies must make sense. You must not go out and start irritating people. For example, how can you come out and say that a kid who is brilliant cannot go to the university because he is not 18 years old? When I got admission to study law in the University of Ife, I was 17 years old. So, many of these new policies that they are bringing out now don’t make sense and these are all the things that make people think that this government is not thinking through many of their processes and the life experiences that people have. If it is a proof, you will have credibility. It is not a political slur to say you don’t have credibility; what it means is that people are not following you. You are on your own even though you are supposed to lead all of us into prosperity.

If you believe that the Tinubu government is not performing, are you planning to join the attempts to unseat him in 2027 or do you think they deserve another four years after 2027 to give them enough time so that their reforms can take hold and deepen?

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 and 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. My feeling is that they don’t intend to come back because the way they are behaving is the feeling of somebody who knows that he is going to come back. They are behaving like one chance; we are there now and we are leaving. But, the task before us is not to think in terms of election years because between now and 2027, how many more people will be kidnapped? How many more will die of poverty; how many more industries will collapse and how many more opportunities will be 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 television, they won’t say that the opposition has come again. I am talking to them like we are brothers. You are running the affairs on our behalf, please you are not doing well, listen to us. There is not rocket science in what you are doing. The solutions to the country’s problems are there. It is a very wealthy country, so if you can govern our wealth well Nigerians are very resourceful and hardworking. If you can motivate them well, the people are cooperative and generous. So, you don’t abuse the kindness of the people and their patience. So, we can listen to some of these ideas. I am more interested in if I have to choose between removing Tinubu in 2027 and improving Tinubu in 2025. I would rather improve Tinubu in 2025 so that people don’t suffer and that this country doesn’t go into doldrums. There are a lot of crises that are facing this country that we monitor on a daily basis, that the government doesn’t even seem to be aware of and that is what is worrisome. They need to wake up. I don’t want them to be there; I knew that they were not supposed to be there but they are there now, so they need to wake up. But in 2027, Nigeria will have a better chance than they have now.