Adebayo: Tinubu’s Budget is Contradictory, Having Double Digit Inflation is Irrational

The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, in this interview with select journalists, made his views known about the economy, the 2025 national budget proposal presently with the National Assembly and other sundry issues

What do you make of the finance minister statement about the country’s borrowings?

I always wish there will be a good day for Nigeria  but it is not a good day when the finance minister believes the day he goes borrowing in London is a good day. A good day for Nigeria is when Nigeria goes overseas to give investments in the capital market from the excess production that we have. No minister that we had in the past will say the day we went borrowing will be a good day.

America borrows too, what’s your view on that?

America borrows from within. You borrow from your own currency. I am not quarrelling with them borrowing  the currency they issued. When you are  borrowing Euro bond, borrowing currency of other people in other capitals of the world, it’s a sign of crisis. Yes, you can do it but you don’t say it’s a good day for you. If you are anaemic and your neighbour comes to donate blood to you, you should be grateful but you don’t say that’s the best day of your life because you are not supposed to be anaemic in the first place. They need to run the economy in such a way that we can generate capital for ourselves. Fundamentally, I think they are uncoordinated even though he is supposed to be the coordinator of the economy. He is not coordinated. The thinking isn’t coordinated but if they coordinate well and work with us as a population, we should be able generate wealth for the country .

You once said the Tinubu government is suffering from economic illiteracy. What do you make of the parameters of the 2025 budget given the $75 per barrel oil benchmark?

The parameters they have are a bit basic and elementary. Even in those basic elementary parameters, they are not sincere about them. They don’t want to meet them because they are not realistic. The exchange rate they fixed is unrealistic. Given the other measures they have taken, I think it’s lack of coordination that concerns me. I wish for the Tinubu 2025 budget to work. I want them to succeed. I want investors to come to Nigeria. I plead with anyone to have confidence in the economy of Nigeria. That is my desire even though I am in the opposition. However, they are self contradictory as these contradictions would at the end of the day prove themselves. For example, you are working towards, in their mind, if they are able to succeed, they are working towards 15% inflation, any basic microeconomist knows that you must never have double digit inflation. It is one thing to have a high BP, amd the doctor says to you he will only give you medium BP, the doctor wants to kill you because his job is to return your BP to normal. The objective they set, even if they succeed is a failure on its own.

What about the saying that a thousand miles start with a step?

This idea of a thousand miles is not Usain Bolt winning the gold medal all the time. That’s not the philosophy of people who wants to win. I saw the minister and I heard him and I understood the philosophy. I am not against him in person. I like him as a finance person who can manage your asset like merchant banker. There are two things you need to do with the type of our size of our development. First, the fiscal and budgetary housekeeping. That’s the first. The government budgets for itself in the first part of the budget. Then, the second part of the budget signals to the rest of the economy and creates a stimulus for areas they want to emphasize and then use other incentives to encourage others to do investments. They are sending wrong signals. First, in their own housekeeping, they are wrong in the way they are going about it. You cannot say to anybody especially who understands basic microeconomics that your inflation rates cannot be of your unemployment rate. You cannot do it. You have already got it upside down. If you have a 15% inflation rate, definitely, your unemployment cannot go below 15% because of the way you run the economy.

If you listen to the gentleman again, he painstakingly celebrated the idea that they have 25 million households that they are trying to give little money to. Why don’t you have 25 million households from whom you are going to give employment? So you have social register to people you want to give money but you don’t have register of unemployment that you can give jobs. What sense does it make? The idea that you are going to imagine manufacturing by thinking that if you give N50,000 to any enterprise, whether small or medium micro invisible, N50,000? If the person comes to your office to collect the money, he will spend about that on transportation. If you say you want to grow the economy by bringing investors, don’t you understand that borrowing money in the bank is just one of the factors of production. Loan capital, for example, won’t you realize that there are other papers expenditure like labour cost, infrastructure cost and other costs. If you are driving those costs above sustainability, there is no way you can generate employment or capital in the economy.

The Ghanaian electoral chairman says he learnt some lessons from Nigeria in the just concluded general election. What do you make of his statement?

Yes, they took a lot of lesson not to be like Nigeria. That is what it can mean logically because the INEC chairman is a professor because he must be speaking in some sound way because what Ghana has done is exactly the opposite of what we did. They tried to make their own credible. We tried to make ours not credible even though we invested more in terms of technology, quality of manpower. You don’t go to other countries and find professor emeritus, dean of faculties, vice-chancellors coming to be returning officers.

You talked about credibility. It’s one thing to talk about problems, it’s another to talk of solution. What can Nigeria do to have credible elections in terms of voter participation?

Everybody involved knows what to do. The question is if they have the attitude to do it. Three things you must have for a good elections. You must go to an election with attitude of winning or losing honestly. You shouldn’t be desperate. Secondly, those who participate in it must know that it is constitutional duty that goes beyond putting government in place. It is a duty they owe the society as a whole, so they do it with integrity. Thirdly, they should not expect personal gain from it. Those who come to vote should not expect to sell their votes. Those who administer election should not collect bribe to administer election. Journalists who carry the news should be truthful to the country and the judiciary when asked to come and look at the some of the errors. They should try their best 

Now about what you said about the judiciary, will it ever get to that stage where we would not need the judiciary to decide out elections?

Left to me, we can get there today. What we need and I have advocated it all the time, is that you take mainstream judiciary away from election for the sake of the country and the judiciary itself. Then, you must have a constitutional court that you set up, not from the regularly judiciary, may be retired justices, people who are no longer in a promotion or anything like that. You bring them together. When you bring them together, they do three things — the election is not finalised until that constitutional court has looked into it. Two, the person who files a complaint against the election doesn’t have to prove anything. All he has to say is that I don’t agree with the election. It is the burden of proof that the election was in order, should be on INEC because INEC knew where the bodies were buried. You cannot tell somebody who didn’t conduct the election,’ I give you 21 days tell me everything that is wrong with the election. Thirdly, people should not assume that because you lost an election, it is automatically rigged. That should not be the attitude. There should be fewer petitions based on merit.

When you say there is a low approval rating of INEC from Nigerians, what do you mean by politicians putting more challenges on INEC by trying to circumvent the rules?

No doubt, the problems of Nigeria are traceable to the political class. When I addressed the forum of House of Representative recently that Nigeria needs to rehabilitate the political class because when you have a decent political class, people full of integrity, many of the problems associated with politics or politicians will be removed. INEC itself has a bit of challenge whether for the sustainability of their appointment or people have discovered that they can get rich by taking advantage of the desperation of politicians. Most of the problems of election didn’t arise from INEC. They arise from the political parties. More political parties commit crimes in their primaries than they accuse INEC of. So, whatever error INEC commits, they even commit more. People bribes delegate for elections. Party chairmen and secretaries switch names like the game of domino. So, political class is guilty. I agree with that. But INEC is supposed to be a professional class. In that case, they should not collaborate with the politicians.

The Ghanaian electoral boss says in Ghana, rarely do you see people cross carpet. But here in Nigeria, you can say PDP is APC and you won’t be wrong. Take it further, there appears to be no opposition in Nigeria, it’s like dead, including your party, is that correct?

The issue is this, let’s start with INEC. The problem in Nigeria is that everybody is an expert in other people’s business. It is not the duty of the INEC chairman to teach politicians how to politik. His job is to administer election. Leave them to cross-carpet, that is outside your power. What you should do is to conduct credible elections and monitor your staff to see that you don’t switch elections, you don’t switch off the servers, you don’t do nonsense that is associated with electioneering. Once you have clean your own Augean table, you can have the moral standing to now pontificate for others. With respect to the opposition you talked about, opposition in our system of government is opposition of ideas, not opposition on the streets. The problem people have with opposition is that Labour Party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the All Progressives Congress (APC) are all of the same philosophy.

What about your party, the SDP?

We have a different philosophy.

How is yours different from them?

We are left of the centre and our policies are different. If you listen to us during the campaign, you juxtapose our policies with that of former Governor Peter Obi, President Bola Tinubu and former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar. You will think they were written from the same script. They are in different parties but they believe in the same thing, economic theory. If Peter Obi was in power, he will find another person, not Wale Edun, one who sounds like him. On cross carpeting, it is not a major problem. It is bad. But the important thing is that you must have definition of ideas. If somebody crosses from PDP to APC, he hasn’t really crossed. It’s like one moving from one room to another within the same bungalow. It is when somebody crosses from an ideological divide. So, they are parties of the same ilk. What Nigerians need now is to invest the attention, belief and time in alternative thinking. And to say there is no opposition, the job I am doing now is constructive opposition.

What do you make of rotational presidency?

Rotation is at two levels. You must rotate according to geopolitical zone for peace among the elite. But you must rotate from the elite to the people for growth and justice to happen in Nigeria. If you are rotating from north to south and all of that and rotating about the same wasteful elite who have no idea, you will be rotating poverty, insecurity and others. But if you rotate from them, in terms of inter generational from the old people to the young ones and from ideological rotation from those who follow IMF-World Bank to those who have indigenous ideas and authentic pro-Nigeria ideas, you would have some progress for the country.