Adebayo: Tinubu’s Administration Responsible for Nigeria’s Economic Woes

The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Ebenezer Adebayo, in this interview, said the economic woes the country is presently experiencing is caused by the President Bola Tinubu-led administration which formulates policies without thinking through and thoroughly. For Adebayo, this administration is not in government but just doing business with Nigerians as its customers

The Federal Government through Vice-President Kashim Shettima in a recent Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG) event, said that the policies of the government are inevitable and necessary to ensure the prosperity of the country. Do you agree with this assertion?

No. I do not agree at all. That is the problem of poor economic thinking. When the structural adjustment programme was introduced in the 1980s, there was Chief Olu Falae, Secretary to the Government of the Federation at that time, who said there was no alternative to the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). This idea that there is no alternative is contrary to the whole idea of economics because the whole idea of economics is about alternatives. I don’t blame them, I don’t blame the VP. I blame the NESG. In a democratic society, you don’t become a lab dog of a government.  When you invite the government of the day to your event, you also invite alternative view, the opposition. That is how the developed countries are doing it. When the government person speaks first, then, there will be a reporter. You cannot just assume. You just follow the government hook, line and sinker.  The vice-president with due respect, needs to go back to elementary economics.  The whole idea of economics is to choose from the alternatives, to make a choice. They made a wrong choice, at the wrong time. That is why they are suffering the consequences.  And you need to understand that why I have zero sympathy for them is that, one, they are the party in power before and they said they would continue from where President Buhari stopped.  Secondly, they ssid they understood the problem at hand. The president said don’t pity me. I know what I am getting involved in. Thirdly,  the problems they said they are solving were caused by them. The inflation was caused by them. The rise in factor cost was caused by them. The mischief, which they said they were going to solve, the subsidy, they have not even touched the surface. So, these are their own crises. It’s like someone going to the Chinese shop with a bull, and later says he is doing remedial operations there. You would cause a damage. So, nobody should tell me there is no alternative. I can give you five good alternatives immediately. 

It’s easier to talk than act. When you are on the seat, don’t you think there are challenges and can be overwhelming? 

No, it is easier to talk if you don’t think. But if you think, you will think thoroughly before you talk. It is your talk, you walk. They have not been thinking. I am not saying this just to be funny with them. ‘Emi lokan’, meaning, it’s my turn, is not an economic philosophy. The essence of coming is to tell us what you want to do. Dodging debate is not an economic policy. ‘Ba la blu,  bu la ba’ and all those blabbing is not an economic debate. They did not articulate what they wanted to do. They did not understand the implications of the decision they were taking. They do not have the executive capacity to run a neo-liberal economic setting. You can run it, it is an alternative. 

So, are you in favour a neo-liberal economic policy?

No, I am not in favour of it. But when I am criticising somebody who is implementing it, I criticise them based on their own paradigm belief.  I cannot force you to believe what I believe. But within the framework of what you say you believe, the main primary objective of a monetary policy in a neo-liberal economy is to achieve full employment. Have they done that? They have not. That is the problem. So, they are not going anywhere. You can give them 40 years they are not going anywhere.

You talked about thinking, which appears we outsourced, especially in Africa and become dependent such that we wait for people to give us solutions and ideas. How do we get out of that?

You have to first come to power on the merit of your ideas, not on the number of bullion vans you can summon over the weekend. You have to support people based on their capacity not because you become a political contractor and they give you N2 billion, N3 billion to go and do media work, then you follow them. You have to say, this person has the vision for the country. If you look at the First Republic, the most dominant education people had is the PPE philosophy. Political Science and Economics. If you don’t have that knowledge, you cannot work for the common good. Productivity of a country is tapped from the people in that country and for the resources of that country the people are endowed with. That was why David Recardo came up with what he called comparative advantage. What does it mean? It means you plan your economy according to your geography and history, and the vision you have for yourself. So, you don’t  just copy holus bolus from another place.

For example, look at the CBN (the governor), he is doing Paul Volcker. He is thinking if he continues raising interest rates, he can fight inflation. That is what he is trying to do, just like Paul Volcker did in the 80s for United States President Jimmy Carter. The difference is that it wasn’t Jimmy Carter that caused the inflation, it was inflation inherited from Ford and Nixon because of the expansion especially because of the Vietnam war. He realised he had to fight inflation but inflation was coming from the availability of credit. So he called Paul Volcker to come and help manage the interest rate which was up to 20%, 21%, but what did America do? America had contraction. Jimmy Carter sacrificed himself and lost the election because you contracted the GDP. In this case, what Cardoso is doing in the CBN makes no sense because  what is driving inflation is factor cost, not the availability of credit.

We claim to be capitalist by nature, but in actual fact, its pseudo capitalism. What are those economic policies you said you could suggest to the government?

The first thing you do as a government is you start from in-house. The thing the government had control over is called the fiscal policy. How much revenue you receive and the expectations you make. That was when they started frightening us from President Goodluck Jonathan’s time. Oh, we are spending N1.9 trillion on subsidy, and then became N4 trillion on subsidy. And they were projecting at the tail of President Muhammadu Buhari’s departure that it was going to N8 trillion.  And I said to them that they don’t need to worry about it. What they need to do first was to govern the subsidy programme to know what you are consuming  and do the volumetric of it so that we know who is consuming it and where it is. Secondly, you need to do a shift where the vulnerable are taking off petrol locomotion or petrol consumption. You can do that by having public transportation. Thirdly, you block loopholes in your economy.  For example, like I explained during the campaign, if you are losing 80% of your crude to oil theft, what can subsidy do for you? If you look at the compensation and palliative that you have to give by removing subsidy, is five times or 10 times subsidy.  For example, when President Tinubu came, it was around 198. People are paying N1,500 now. So, if you buy a million litres, that’s a trillion naira. Let’s say people buy half a million litres, which means everyday you add N500 billion to the inflation pressure. 

Another problem they had was to go and devalue the currency and had the illusion of money, which means at FAAC, you will say we used to share N2 trillion, but now we share N10 trillion but your N10 trillion is not up to the dollar of the past and if you look at the contraction of the economy, our foreign exchange earning is still stuck at the real value of the 90s which is why I say why don’t we employ the people. Right now, they are not employing people. They kill all the institutions that can employ people, and they are not making incentive for doing business in Nigeria, comparing it with global incentives.  Look at the USA, what is incentive. Incentive is the availability of credit. If you want to do business, you can not get a better credit facility than the US. In China, you have infrastructure support such that with $1 million, you can have a factory of $1 billion because the state will support you. In Europe, they support you with social services, meaning you don’t have to worry about transportation, health or insurance because the state is taking care of that. Here, the only thing I had before was because we produced crude oil, so we had low energy costs. So if anybody wanted to produce anywhere in the world, they would say you can go to Nigeria because they had low energy cost. So because they had low energy cost, you can pay low wages to workers, so you have cheap labour. That’s all gone now because your energy cost is kind of marching with the developed world now. So, what is the advantage that you have?

So, are you saying the policies are out of sync with your realities and your historical context?

And they are showing crass economic illiteracy, that is a problem because if you look at the way they even analyse data. You don’t just come out and say there is no alternative. You put your data together and then do your econometrics analysis of your data and get a data driven decision-making. It is not dogmatic.  Look at their medium-term expenditure framework, they are not keeping to it.  There is nothing they are keeping to.

Are you in that camp of people that is saying that we are being held hostage by the people running the country?

They are not running the country. They are just doing business. Occasionally, they get distracted with governmental duties, but their primary duty is business, and they think that is why they are trying to run the petroleum industry  rather than have a regulatory framework. They are not running the economy. They are not running the government. They don’t see you and me as citizens, they see us as customers. They are mercantile in their approach. They see you as a customer as they can get extra money from you by hoarding petrol. I can get extra money from you by under funding public education. So, they are not willing to do anything as they are not ready to comply with Chapter 2 of the Constitution, which stipulates how governance should be done in Nigeria. What is the responsibility of the government? Call anybody in government. They are not responsible for anything because the minister of water resources is not responsible for whether you have water or not. The minister of education is not responsible for educational outcome, whether students fail WAEC, JAMB, he is not responsible.  The minister of health is not responsible for your life expectancy or medical outcomes. They just carry these titles to enable them to put out their signatures to award contracts. Beyond that, they are not going to do anything. Remember that in the past, Lagos had the best water in all the English speaking world, whether London, Brisbane, anywhere. Nobody is giving water to anybody. Before, we had the best hospitals. UCH, Ibadan used to come first or second among the entire English speaking world. We have people who are in power, but they are not in government because they are not governing.

You ran for the presidency, but you didn’t make it, it might be difficult for SDP to make it. Have you thought about coalescing with other parties, kind of alliances before 2027?

There must be a meeting of the mind. Power for power’s sake is a disgrace. You can see what happens to Buhari fiasco.  You can see what’s happening to the bunch who are there now. The first thing to do is meeting of the mind. If you want to run a bank, you cannot form an alliance with those who want to loot the bank. What you do is to see how to change their mind. I have been going round, sympathising with them and giving opinion. I am not against them. I am against their ideas or lack of ideas. It is not that we want to be in government at all costs. I would rather not be in government than be useless in government.  What we are trying to do is build alliances of all Nigerians.  If you look at the number of people who voted for the people who scored the first three largest bunch of votes, they are not up to a minority of minorities.  What we are trying to do is to see majority of Nigerians who are suffering and get them to realise that there is a link between how you voted, or who you listen to, and the effect you have now. If we can now have a realisation, if it’s President Tinubu himself who realises he is missing his way and wants to queue up behind us, we don’t mind at all, but I am not going to say for the sake of coming to power, I will go and join people who are running the country aground. It is better to have an alternative to remind people of what government should look like.