INTERVIEW: IMF feels Tinubu govt not punishing Nigerians enough – Adebayo

The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, in the 2023 general elections, Prince Adewole Adebayo has warned Nigerians to avoid putting pressure on the government to meet up with International Monetary Fund, IMF, standards as that would worsen the economic woes of the country.

Looking at the present condition of things in the country, ranging from economy to judiciary, transportation, agriculture and many more and given the fact that you wanted to preside over the affairs of this country when you contested the presidential election last year; what is your perspective on the situation of the country today?

I think they are predictably bad. They are where we said they would be. Luckily, they are not as bad as we feared, given the policy options adopted, the mentality and attitude to governance adopted by many of the political parties and contestants, one of whom is now our President and Commander-in-Chief.

So, there is that cavalier attitude where they will not discuss policies and just assert their entitlement because they have been in politics for a long time, and their friends are everywhere. They believe that when they come in, they will have access to patronage of power. Is it my religion or yours? Is it your tribe or mine? Is it my zone or your zone? Those things don’t impact the lives of the people and they don’t power the ship of state. But, those were the issues that were dominant during the election.

Even now, to get policy rich issues into the mainstream, you will get comments by former this and that. Even when they don’t have policy disagreement, they will still have what the late Fela Anikukapo used to call ‘Yabis night’ at the shrine in those days. What the Nigerian political class has turned the entire four years to is ‘Yabis years.’ They just come, say what you like, and whether it is consistent with what you have done all your life doesn’t matter. Just say anything; whatever cheap shot you can throw and at the end of the day, no policy is implemented.

Remember there are four pillars of governance that you can use in knowing if the military and security agencies are effective. When life and property are safe, governance is taking place even if the president doesn’t talk. If the civil servants are delivering on services and they are meeting their targets; if people have better electricity, better healthcare; if the rule of law is working through the judiciary; if the industry is working, and industry this time, is in two branches -professional like lawyers, nurses, and productive industry like manufacturing, agriculture, and extractive industry; if those ones are working, whether people like your face or not, the evidence will be clear that governance is taking place.

The government has also tried to put a number of policies in place but the manufacturing sector has kept complaining that the policies aren’t working for them. Consumers in the electricity sector are kicking against tariff as it is affecting them heavily and even the IMF is also kicking against the government policies; what are your thoughts?

The policies the manufacturers are quarrelling about are their own policies. They have the same policies. The manufacturing association of Nigeria is almost like a historic society. It is better called the manufacturing museum association of Nigeria because there are no industries anymore. If you look at the critical sector of the economy, there is no industry.

The IMF isn’t saying what we are saying. We are saying that the policies of the government don’t fit into our socio-economic situation, as they don’t address our needs but the IMF is saying that the government is not punishing us enough because they have not been able to get enough consensus for deeper reforms. The IMF is calling you a resource intensive country. They change their language every time because they change consultants who use new words for them.

They are saying that we are oil export dependent, and as a result of that, we are not able to do the kind of reforms they want. They said that because we fall into the bracket of people who used between two and five percent of their revenue to pay interest on loans, they see it as stress. But, none of the indices deals with the problems we have in the country.

If you keep amplifying what the IMF is saying and you put pressure on the government to react to meet up with the IMF’s standard, things would be worse because the errors they are committing now will make them commit more.

So, what is the way out; what would you do if you were in their shoes?

What I would have done was to form a government; they haven’t done that till this day.

They haven’t formed a government?

Yes, they have not. For example, naming three spokespersons for one man shows that they are just announcing names. You need to gather all the talents in the country; that should be your first duty. We have a problem in our constitution, which says that only one man is the government. Section 5 of the constitution says all executive powers are vested in the government. If you want to talk about the government today, you can only talk about President Bola Tinubu. He is the only one lawfully in government.

What about the state governors?

I am talking about the Federal Government because the states don’t run macro-economics. What they do is to run their own state. They just collect money and spend because if the broad national issues are being discussed, the president is the only executive. He has to bring talents from all over the country to form a cabinet, but he hasn’t done that. He has named some ministers.

Many of them, the only thing they know about are the routes to their office; to engage issues on their mandate is difficult. Apart from going to the weekly executive council meeting and somebody is asked to address the media, try to track decisions they make in the federal executive council, and you see that the majority of it are mere approvals, not policy. They are like a tender’s board. They have turned themselves into a tender’s board, where contracts are taken to them. Once the contract is above ministerial level, you send it to the council and it is approved.

If you look at the budget they are working on now, they have reached N45 trillion which means, technically speaking, their year two budget is worse than a leaner and worse than their year one budget because the N45 trillion, if you put it in terms of inflation and in terms of the debasement of the currency, they are not able to achieve anything. Remember they have been talking about the fact that they have gained more revenue. Secondly, they need to take control of the security of the country

In terms of economic policy, what would you have done differently?

For the policy to be adopted, one is security. There is a linkage between security and economics. If you must deal with inflation, you must provide food for the people. Therefore, you need to do some agriculture. That means you need to be in charge of the land around the country.

Secondly, you need to find a way to employ people. There are three ways to employ people. One of them is to spend the money you have on social investment. It’s in the news that about N123 billion of the UBEC money has not been accessed by states. That means if they have it, more children will be in school. You will be able to hire more teachers, and the teachers will have to pay for food, and accommodation, and you grow the economy from there.

The government does three things when you are in charge of the economy. You control government spending at the federal level. You control subsidiary spending at state and local government levels. You control private sector spending because people will align their own investments to what the government policy is.

What exactly do you mean by forming a government because as it stands, there is a cabinet in place, comprising ministers with even two coordinating ministers supervising other ministries?

Taking one action is not the same thing as implementing policy. I can say today if I am in government, block all the roads, but that doesn’t mean I am constructing roads. I am just taking action. The fact that you removed fuel subsidy doesn’t make it a proper policy because in policy analysis, policy has its origin, including the objective you want to achieve, the counter measure and the feedback.

The entire gamut of a thoroughly read out policy, they don’t have it. They don’t have the uniformity and interpretation of any of the things. So, they don’t have any policy. Of course, you go to the central bank, what is the policy? We just float currency, what happened? Where is the other component of that policy? Where is the policy communication? But occasionally, they take sporadic actions which have an impact on the lives of the people; that still does not amount to a well thought out policy.

Is it that they don’t have a policy or we just haven’t sat down to listen to what they are saying?

We have listened to them and they are giving us a headache because they don’t have consistency in what they are saying. They don’t want to be answerable to what they are saying. Who is the economy spokesperson for the government? The vice president is constitutionally empowered to coordinate the economy.

Then, the Minister of Finance is given the title as coordinating minister because in that team, he has himself and the Minister of Economic Planning, but you don’t see them coordinating. The gentleman in the ministry of health, a brilliant doctor, coordinating social welfare, cannot even run hospitals, let alone talk of social welfare.

Recently former President Olusegun Obasanjo advised the government to change their economic policies as they are adversely affecting livelihood in Nigeria. What are views about his comments?

Obassnjo’s comment is right in some parts. With due respect to Obasanjo, I have two problems with his intervention. Don’t criticise somebody over something you have done before because they won’t listen to you; they would say you did the same thing.

Secondly, if you change your mind because we learn every day, if you change your mind about some things you did in the past, you can tell the younger one that I made a mistake in my time for not reforming the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, I made a mistake in selling all these institutions that I sold, including the defunct National Electric Power Authority, NEPA, Nigeria Telecommunications, NITEL, and Nigeria Airways among others. You shouldn’t have sold them away because without that you cannot generate employment and run the economy.

For example, why would you sell the Nigerian Airways? Was it because they didn’t have aircrafts? Are aircrafts the real money? The real money of Nigeria Airways was the BASA agreement with billions of dollars. Even if you had no single aircraft, the fact that they had the right to fly to Brazil, America and different parts of the world was enough money on its own. All over the world, airliners are looking for places where you have the right to fly to, but he is no longer in government now. But he can come, keep the hypocrisy aside because hypocrites can still be right.

The person who doesn’t take a shower regularly can still tell you, you haven’t taken a shower today. He is correct.

What part of Obassnjo’s comment, in your views, was correct?

Yes, the state capture is correct. He gave a beautiful lecture at Yale University during the Chinua Achebe lecture. It was a perfect lecture. The only difference he should have said was I, together with them, we did state capture. The fact is that state capture was done truly and if one of the participants is confessing, I don’t think we should interfere.

But, the lesson to learn in that discussion is that if former President Obasanjo can be talking like this, it means that he is now looking from outside that that thing I used to do which I didn’t know the effect of, this people are now carrying it on and now we must all stop it. If a person used to be a smoker, he is criticising you that you are smoking now, it is because you were smoking when you were younger. That doesn’t mean smoking is good.

The bottomline is that the direction we have been taking since 1999 is not the right direction and that is why we have been having bad results. The difference is that Obasanjo had efficiency. Obasanjo knows how to govern even when he has bad policy. He had the presence of mind to govern, compared to those who are there now who don’t have the presence of mind to govern.

Obasanjo has the time to consult, he has the ability to explain; he was not too afraid of bringing talents to his government. That doesn’t mean you will agree with him on all his policies. After all, if he was successful, many of the problems the subsequent administrations met on ground wouldn’t have been met. But that doesn’t disqualify him from pointing out what is wrong. More so, he has been in that office a number of times. Even if you are doing what he has done before, that is not an excuse.

What about the response of this government to him?

I don’t want to comment on them. First, who are the people responding? The people responding are not responsible in government; you cannot take it too seriously. There is no person who is properly in government that is responding. There are people in the corridor who just write whatever they like.

So, who is proper to have responded?

When Obasanjo speaks on a matter of national importance, the person to speak is the incumbent president himself because Obasanjo is not a small fry. When he is speaking and raising issues in the country, the president himself needs to respond to that. When presidents are responding to each other, the language is better, the clarity is there. Short of that, the vice president should respond, if he impacts the economy, but if the two of them are distracted by other things, the minister of information. I don’t see anything wrong in taking clarification from Obasanjo because these things he is discussing are the normal routine in government because opinions must fly.

You must agree or disagree, but the bottomline is that while all of this politics is going on, governance must be on the ground in every facet. This government is not on ground and one needs to let them know that whatever you are doing in the State House as in the president goes from the State House to the airport and flies out and flies back to the State House, all of this isn’t governance. You can see what the FCT minister is doing. He doesn’t need to talk to you. You can see it. You can see the gentleman of the interior ministry. You can see that he is responding to policy issues himself, not a question of sending a spokesperson and he is taking measures to give the homeland services to the people.