The candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the February 2023 presidential election, Mr Adewole Adebayo, in this interview by SUBAIR MOHAMMED, speaks on the economic hardship Nigerians are going through, policies and programmes of the President Bola Tinubu administration and solutions to the challenges.
You lost the last presidential election to President Bola Tinubu. Do you think the country could have been better with you as president?
Definitely. I am not surprised at the state of the economy but I am disappointed. I am not surprised because we predicted this outcome. During the 2023 presidential debate, we urged Nigerians to pay attention to issues. There were three issues that needed to be dealt with. First was the cost of governance. Another was subsidy removal not only on petrol but in other sectors of the economy and lastly, the issue of foreign exchange. On these three issues, I disagreed with President Bola Tinubu of the APC [All Progressives Congress], former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar of the PDP [Peoples Democratic Party] and former Governor Peter Obi of the Labour Party. It has never worked in any country. When SAP [Structural Adjustment Programme] was introduced in Nigeria, it didn’t work for us.
It is not about whether one person is good or the other person is bad. If you drag me to the Aso Villa or Eagle Square and you force me to announce these policies, you will get the same result. Anyone who adopts these same policies will get the same result. Economists would ask if there are countries that have adopted these policies. Are there countries within our hemisphere, countries within our state of development and primary production sector that have adopted these policies and it worked? I don’t think so. I am surprised that some personalities were talking about the Argentina model. I am very familiar with this model. If you ask the average Argentine to choose between President Javier Milei and President Bola Tinubu, they will tell you to bring Tinubu and they will gladly give you Milei.
So, Atiku Abubakar was wrong when he recommended the Argentina model to Tinubu?
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar may be well intentioned, but he was misinformed. It was an error. If you look at the situation in Argentina, we may get to that position. I hope we are not there yet. We are travelling in that direction but they are ahead of us in terms of economic misery. Argentina has had one month of hyperinflation which was at 512 percent. I don’t know if economists can understand the temperature of 512 percent inflation. They have lost virtually all their wealth. The Argentine president is from the Austrian school of thought. The Argentines are complaining on a daily basis as they have had the worst economic performance since 1980. I am not saying we should not criticise the non-performing government of President Tinubu but you cannot say a person that is complaining of too much heat should be put in the oven. That is not the way to solve the problem. These policies are not working but it is unfortunate that Nigerians voted for these policies. We voted for these policies either because we didn’t pay attention to issues or we didn’t understand their implications. When Nigerians voted for a government that says it will remove subsidies, which was what President Tinubu announced on day one, which was what Vice President Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi promised, and Nigerians thought they have experience and that they are more realistic than us. So, they voted that way. So, any of them that formed the government and adopted any of these policies will have at the minimum, what we are experiencing now or even worse. These policies are not good, not because of the political parties that announced them but because they are not structurally suitable to us. Of course, they come with some benefits and these benefits are visible. It means more income for the government because the subsidy regime is no more. It means more income from the foreign exchange differential because they are not defending the naira in the old way anymore. You also have the benefit of goods becoming cheaper. Some people are exporting goods from Nigeria to Niger and other neighbouring countries because with lower currency, our goods and other products become cheaper. Those are the advertised benefits, but we are not structurally prepared for them.
You said the country’s economic challenges were caused by the removal of fuel subsidy but some informed people are of the view that the economy had been in a bad shape and that these policies are needed to revamp it?
I don’t agree with any of your postulations. Why? There are arguments but it is not every argument that addresses the core issue. For every decision you make in economics, you will have two or more choices. In our case, we have several choices but we decide to create a world that does not require better governance. We are subsidising so many things in this country. Secondly, there was no attempt to do auditing. You will recall that I shouted during the last election that 80 percent of our crude was stolen. I made this one of the issues of my campaign for months but unfortunately, voters didn’t realise that whoever was able to tackle the crude oil theft should be the one to lead the country. Our problems are not difficult to solve. They are not insurmountable. It is just that the method to solve them will not be a continuation of what they were doing before.
Do you think President Tinubu has the right team working with him to solve these economic challenges?
He has the right team to assist in what he wants to do but what he is doing isn’t right. But if I wanted to fix the country, I would bring a different team to fix it.
The economy is bleeding, if you were elected the president, what would you do differently to stop the bleeding?
If I were elected president, I would not announce any of these policies. In fact, I would go to the National Assembly to amend the Appropriation Act and the Petroleum Industry Act to remove these statutory mandates to yank off the subsidy. If I became the president today, the first thing I would do is to convince Nigerians and the government that these policies are not right. If you say I should advise a president who believes that the benefits of these policies are down the line, he is not going to listen to me because he is committed to the benefits of the policies. So, the first thing to do is to convince him that the benefits never came to England. England industrialised itself. These benefits didn’t come to Brazil until President Lula came and changed them towards social investments. I don’t know where they got the policies from, but I suspect it is from either the IMF or the bankers who contributed to their campaigns and insisted on these policies.
If they are ideologically committed to these policies, then the solution they can think of is provision of palliative which is to suspend the full effect of it overtime. But what they will soon discover is such that the social misery will be so much, the inflation and hyperinflation will be so much that the money they saved may not be up to the money they spend on palliative. So, they need a change of direction even though I cannot guarantee that a well experienced accountant who is a cost cutter like Tinubu, who has Wale Edun around him and chosen Cardoso as his preferred central bank governor, will be willing to change for now. I think they should just be a little more efficient in the macro-economy policies they have taken and there are five measures they should have if they must take it. One of such is that they must have a way to increase their revenue, because right now, they are just collecting less than 20 percent of the collectibles. There are so many sacred cows they don’t want to collect money from.
Secondly, they need to bring efficiency to their accounts. Running a free market economy as they are going towards, they need more feedback, more sensitivity, quicker reaction time, which means they need to put sharper and smarter people in their governance. Thirdly, they need to restructure government spending in such a way that they separate the fiscal spending which they are controlling and let the CBN governor run his monetary policy and be a banker to the country not to the government alone. Fourthly, they need to find ways to generate employment.
They don’t want to spend money on social programmes as stated in chapter two of the constitution, which means that they will be going to Qatar and other places because of the sovereign investment money they need to spend to generate employment. They don’t want to spend it because they are following the IMF. Now they will be begging foreign investors to come and put money in our country, money we have even within our country but they will be going out and if they are not efficient in that regard, they cannot succeed. Lastly, they need to do something about inflation. They need to control inflation by controlling their spending, increasing revenue and ensuring they get Nigerians to be more productive.
Do you think the president has what it takes to fix this country?
I have the feeling that anybody who is determined to fix Nigeria and who wants to listen to Nigerians and carry everybody along and look for the best talents and not just political party alone will do well. I would have preferred Nigerians voted for me, which was why I didn’t support him. I think I would have done better than him. But anybody who is put there and who is determined to use all the resources in Nigeria can succeed. Of course, the president is a Nigerian, well educated, quite intelligent but he has wrong policies. He needs to open his mind and get ideas from other people and add to his. There is no escaping the consequences of the policies people voted for.
