•Tinubu Presidency a political movement, not a government
The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 presidential election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has lamented that President Bola Tinubu and his team are busy enlarging their political coast, enlarging business empires that support that political empire, and playing chess while the entire country is burning.
In this interview with Sunday Ani, Adebayo spoke on a variety of national issues, asserting that President Tinubu’s administration is not a government but a political movement that has mismanaged the economy and brought untold hardship on Nigerians.
Politics should be about greater public interest, to uplift the well-being and welfare of the greatest number of people. Is that what we are seeing today in Nigeria?
Well, you know, democracy is a blank cheque and it’s a unique kind of cheque because the beneficiaries are allowed to write their names or whatever name they like on it, the amount they want, the bank they want and sign it. Now, if the majority, instead of writing their own names, are writing the names of politicians, writing amounts the bank doesn’t have, and don’t remember their own signature, it is the fault of the writer of the cheque. Democracy wants you to be who you want to be. So, you will see that some of the governors were civil servants, some of them were hybrid businessmen, some of them were completely jobless, but they’ve used the opportunity of democracy to turn their own lives around. They are now former governors, former ministers, former vice president, former president, former this and former that. And some are still coming back for other things.
It is left for the Nigerian people to use these politics to turn their own lives around, by ensuring that they do not give their votes or support or sentiment in favour of those who are grabbing state power or who are capturing it. To capture the state is not a one-step episode. It is that you go and grab the subset of the state. You grab political power, some grab money, then they start to grab state institutions one by one. Even right now, you will see that those who ruined the opportunities of the people, those who have not allowed the country to see one day of progress, are now the ones claiming to be the opposition. Very soon, they will claim to be the media. And before long, they will completely grab the judiciary and law enforcement. So, this is the situation you find in a democracy where there’s an abdication on behalf of those who are responsible.
In a monarchy, the only time we talk about abdication is when the king or queen abdicates or gives up power. But, in a democracy, you have abdication when the people either show apathy or show poor judgment or completely give up that there’s nothing they can do to correct the situation in the country. So, if anyone is going to wake up the country and make our democracy to work, the person has to wake up the conscience and consciousness of the people.
And the issues at stake now are whether we want to be a lawful, constitutional democracy in which we follow the rule book, which is the constitution of Nigeria. If we want to solve this question of poverty, insecurity and all the under development indices that people are now quarrelling about, we have to look at chapter two of the constitution, which is properly styled fundamental objectives and directive principle of state policy. So, if you miss the fundamental objective of a journey and you forget the directive principle as to the destination you are going, why should you wonder that you spent 60 years in the wilderness? You’ve forgotten the destination you’re going to, you’ve forgotten the purpose of going and forgotten everything.
Why did we ask the British to leave us alone? We asked the British to leave us alone because we wanted to determine our own destiny. We wanted to develop our own country. We wanted freedom. We wanted equality as much as possible. And we wanted to have a country where the imagination of the black man can be translated into the reality of infrastructure, development and other manifestations in both our rural and urban centres. And we wanted our people to go into the world as ambassadors of black greatness. So, this is why we asked the British to go. They did it, it’s not like they offended us.
Our own government since independence has done more harm to us in terms of offences, in terms of criminality, in terms of inhumanity than the British did. The reason our founding fathers asked the British to leave was because of the imagination that they had of what the black man could achieve for himself in his own domain. And those dreams are there. They are alive.
What is your take on the recent comment by the president of the African Development Bank, Dr Adesina regarding Nigeria’s economic growth?
With respect to the comments by the president of the African Development Bank, yes, he’s talking in terms of GDP. He’s talking of GDP divided by population. That’s essentially what he’s discussing and you know, as well as I do that that is just a fractional measurement. It is looking at the picture of you from an angle. So, if someone were to stay behind you now and take a picture, it is not what I’m seeing that that person would be seeing, because I’m seeing you from your frontal perspective. And if somebody was to take a picture of you from the ceiling, we would see a different thing. So, the GDP is a measurement that if you take, the number is just a mathematical conclusion.
So if, for example, our population had reduced, whether due to natural or unnatural causes and our GDP is still the same, our capital income would have risen. So, if we count some other things we are not counting now, our GDP would have risen. But overall, what we need to understand is that the state of our economy is bad. And that picture painted by the GDP, or the per capita income, which is lower than it was in 1960, is proof that we have not been able to get to our potential.
It doesn’t mean that we have not made progress in the last 60 years. We’ve made progress, but there’s no progress we have made now, as of 2025, that we didn’t expect to have made by 1975. So, I think that overall, there’s no need to argue about it. It is a result sheet for all the governments that have been in power since 1960. Those who were in power from 1960 to 1966 have done quite well, because if you take the growth that they managed to contribute, they made the most progress. The second largest progress was made by Gowon from 1966 to 1975 when he left. And incidentally, the third most performing government was Obasanjo’s military from 1976 to 79.
It appears we are losing ground with successive governments. How did we arrive at that?
Yeah, you are losing ground the more because if you take a bottle of any drink, and you keep diluting it with water, the taste won’t be the same again. First, you take a bottle of any drink and you put a bottle of water, the first mix will give you half of the taste. Now, if you take that diluted one, and you put another bottle of water, and you further dilute it, as you are doing each dilution, you are getting farther and farther away from the original taste.
The appropriate government for us in this model we have chosen was the government that resembled as much as what the British left; an independent civil service, a parliament where people discuss policies, a more diversified power base or power bases, that one has its own weaknesses, but it has more advantages and more growth at various levels. So, the highest contribution to our GDP at that time was rural development; the ability of the various regional governments to transform rural communities into economic power businesses. So, the groundnut pyramids that you will see in Kaduna and Kano were not produced in those cities. They are a receipt, a resort, an evidence of productivity in the rural areas.
And then you see the same thing with the Cocoa House in Ibadan. The money did not come from the city of Ibadan, it came from the hinterlands. And if you went to AdaPalm that Michael Opara built in those days, and you went to many parts of the eastern region, especially under Michael Opara, you will see that you had one of the fastest growing economies in the modern world at that time. So, all of that was where you had a good civil service that was independent and professional. You had a political system that had its own faults politically, but they were able to stick to the budget, for example. If you and I do budget variance and deviance, you will see that the First Republic, maybe, non-compliance with the budget would be like 0.3 percent to about 1 per cent.
So regression has been on all spheres – public service, quality of polities, state of the economy and all that? Is that what you are saying?
Yeah, the only area we have made progress, undoubtedly, is in numbers. That’s population growth. In our nominal population, we’ve made progress; it has grown. The figures in our budgeting have grown because of inflation. Our economic base has grown, but you have to do a comparison of your economic base with your population, so in absolute numbers, the participation has grown in the economy, but in relative numbers, participation has reduced because you have more ratios of unemployed people, even though you have more people in employment.
So, overall the Federal Government, over time, has now culminated in the unspeakable economic disorientation that President Tinubu is displaying. But if you come down over time, you will see that the various Federal Governments that we have had, have lost control of the economy because they do not know how to stimulate. You know that we made a turn in 1986 when President Babangida introduced SAP. The escapism that was inherent in SAP was that you could move away from government being directly responsible for generating productivity, that you could stimulate productivity by policy and by liberalisation.
The problem with that is that it’s like you getting a remote control to help you control television set, instead of using your hand to tune it. You’re still responsible to ensure that your remote control has a battery, that it’s functional, because ultimately, the fact that you’re using a remote control does not mean that you’re not responsible for tuning the channel or switching it off and on. You are only trying not to do it with proximity and directness. So, the government assumed that without liberalisation, they could just abandon everything. So, because I’ve not privatised or commercialised, I don’t care, for example, if something works.
Like now, you and I know that the quality of calls under Bosun Tijani and President Tinubu is poorer than the quality of calls under Ernest Ndukwe and Obasanjo in those days. So, we have grown in number in terms of the number of subscribers to telecom, but the quality hasn’t grown. We’ve got higher bandwidth now under the present administration than we had under Obasanjo and Ernest Ndukwe in those days but the quality is not better because the population using the bandwidth has also grown higher than the amount of bandwidth. So, don’t just look at per capita income, look at food consumption per capita, nutrition per capita, internet usage per capita, available roads per capita and hospital beds per capita. If you take educational spaces per capita, in those days, up to my time, you had two or three universities trying to select you, so you made a choice as to which one to go to. Now, if after they introduced post-UME or whichever one they use, barely, you have to beg to get a space.
What are your views about Tinubu’s economic policies?
President Tinubu’s economic policies are a continuation of the journey we started in 1986. And the problem with that is that everybody in Nigeria knows that I do not subscribe to these policies, but same way I don’t subscribe to some of the policies in other countries where I’ve lived, for example, in the United States. You will see it now in the witnesses that President Trump is seeing. That’s why they are talking of how to boost tariff. That’s why they are now having other difficulties. That’s why they are sustaining their economy just by massive borrowing, which is not valuable to a country like Nigeria. But there are countries that implement these policies that I don’t agree with, even though the consequences will come down the line, but they are working harder. They are more attuned. They have more sensitivity to any change in data.
The problem I have with President Tinubu, which is the same problem I had with President Buhari and President Jonathan and others before them, is that if you are running a liberal economy, you have to be awake. You have to be sensitive to all the indices. But first, you must be able to have fiscal discipline and monetary efficiency. You don’t have either. You have to be able to work on social fiscal discipline.
Perhaps, you have to break down this fiscal discipline; is it spending rightly and curbing waste, corruption, and all that?
All of that but there are five problems, which I will quickly enumerate. One, they do not capture the revenue correctly. And when you don’t capture revenue correctly, you have waste at the revenue generation end, because you go to a place where you are supposed to collect N100 billion, you only collect N28 billion. So you’ve lost N72 billion gratuitously. It is sometimes because they don’t know what to do. It is often because they want to take money outside the public purview. So you have that problem.
The second problem is that they do not know how to report the money they have captured. So, sometimes the money is in government systems somewhere, sequestered around, but one side does not see the other. And they try to use Remitta and some of these other government financial platforms to capture, but there are still many cracks.
Thirdly, they do not budget properly. So, even the N28 billion that they’ve captured, they will not be able to see more than maybe N18 billion. And when they are budgeting the N18 billion, they don’t budget according to constitutional and commonsensical priorities. So, they budget on things that have no multiplier effect. That’s the third problem there.
Then, the fourth problem they have is that after budgeting, they lose control. Nobody follows the budget. So, they will probably just do 25 per cent performance out of that N18 billion. So, probably the one they can see will not be more than N7 billion that they can actually trace and implement. So the rest, they lose control. But, there will be virement here and there because they’re not implementing the budget. Either they are putting money on something that’s not right for spending now, so the thing will be stuck, or some of the agreements will have problem of litigation and all of the issues.
So, then you have corruption. Either of the one that they couldn’t see, which is now disappearing here and there, or the one they budgeted for, they’re not following, or they share the money with the contractor, or the money is missing. That is why they can be telling you now that they allow Mele Kyari to leave NNPC before you discover that these refineries that we can see, and the amount that we’ve been talking about in public, that the money is not being well spent. You waited for the person to leave, but the President has been the one supervising them. The president is the Minister of Petroleum. Heineken Lokpobiri, the Senator, who is now Minister of State, is still on duty. He’s the one supervising them. And the NNPC board members are people who are very close to the president and Mele Kyari was somebody they met there and they started working with him; he’s not a strange person. But you see now, they’re just discovering that these refineries that they’ve been talking about, that we’ve been praising them for, suddenly there’s some mismanagement. So this is an example of not having a grip.
Lastly, the fifth problem they have is that because of all these previous problems, they are not able to stimulate the private sector. Whereas in their own mentality and the policy they’ve taken, they assume that the majority of the work, new labour created and productivity will come from the private sector, that the private sector is waiting for the government to take the policy lead and give them direction. So an economy is like the field of athletics. The private sectors are the athletes who are on the line. They are waiting for the umpire, which is the government to blow the whistle, to say on your marks, set, go. So if the umpire is sleeping, or while you are on the line, some have already started running, while the law-abiding ones are waiting for the government to blow the whistle, then this is what you have in mismanaged neo-liberal confusion that we’re having now.
That is why these numbers do not surprise me. And that is why these numbers, especially as the election year is coming, everybody is suddenly discovering that Adesina said something. What Dr Adesina said is taught in secondary schools. It is not a sign of some genius. It is a basic thing you have to learn to pass school cert economics. So we know that you take your GDP and divide it by your population. Whatever it bears is your per capita income. That is what we use to determine whether a country is growing or not.
Maybe the devaluation of the Naira or the flotation of the Naira didn’t have the administration here, because these are calculated in dollars. So GDP in dollar terms reduced and per capita in dollar terms also reduced. So it points back to that policy action of flotation of the currency, apparently throwing more people into poverty from the figures we are seeing
You know, if we are to be fair to the Tinubu government, we should talk about the Tinubu presidency, not the Tinubu administration, because there’s no administration going on. What you have is an imperial majesty in the presidency. Their eyes are not to the ground. Do not call them an administration. Just call them the presidency, because they took an oath of office that you are not the president, and they created a group who are in the state house. Beyond that, they have not been able to create an administration. In one or two pockets, you will see administration. If you live in Abuja, you will see that there is an FCT administration, truly. Not that it is perfect, but it is present. And in one or two ministries, you will see occasional flashes of genius. But overall, they are not administering the economy. The economy is on a free fall.
There are things they can do, which they should be able to do, even with all the problems that the global environment is facing.
Can you quickly enumerate a few of them?
They have not been able to write a single good budget. They have written two budgets now. The only difference is that the one that came after is worse than the one before. So they can’t write a good budget. You can see by themselves, they are the ones who beat themselves now, regarding even the refineries. They are not able to get a grip of anything. They are not doing well with employment. They need to know that the tool for dealing with poverty is employment.
I don’t agree with them, for example, on their student loan, because all you need to do is bring the cost of education down, and an average person will be able to go to school without needing a loan. But even with the loan, they are not able to administer it properly. So just see anything they touch. In the classical sense, the Tinubu Presidency is not a government. It may be a political movement that has now found itself in power, and they can now decide to continue to strengthen themselves politically by capturing more governors and more senators and more political parties to join them. But they can also decide to say, let’s sit down. Let us stop all these parades. Let us administer the economy.
An administration is what a president sets up after he’s been elected and sworn in That administration is not political. It’s only political to the extent of being politically sensitive when it’s making decisions. But it’s not determined, it’s not focused on just politics. So it’s not a campaign organization rolling into the statehouse. It is now a government for the people. So they will administer water, air quality, everything that’s within the federal mandate. And they will give leadership to the rest of the economy. I know you haven’t seen that. I haven’t seen that. President Tinubu has not even signalled that. And very few in his presidency are signalling that.
What you see dominating them and the focus of their existence is more power in enlarging their political coast, enlarging business empires that support that political empire, and continue to play chess while the house is burning. They are playing political chess while the entire warehouse is burning.