By Chukwudi Nweje
Presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo speaks on the gaps in the recently constituted federal cabinet, noting that some strategic mandates appear to be in purgatory, not being under specified ministry in terms of designation. He speaks on various issues including what ECOWAS should do with regards to the political crisis in Niger Republic.
President Bola Tinubu has charged his ministers to meet the expectations of Nigerians and work for the interest of Nigeria and not their sections of the country, what do you say to that?
There is nothing unique in that because that is what the oath of office the ministers sworn to says. The President could have simply charged the ministers to take their oath of office seriously, and this has to start from the President himself, the Vice President, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), the principal officers and every other person in public office taking their oath of office seriously.
I will recommend that the oath of office is printed out and posted on the wall of the office of public officials so that they will see it daily; if public officials keep to their oath of office, the country will be in a better place.
Are you satisfied with the placement of the ministers? Is there any one or are there those you feel would have functioned better in another ministry?
The Presidency is a reflection of the President, and once you take the monumental step of electing someone as the President, you should have faith that that person has the capacity to appoint his ministers because the ministers are an extension of the mind of the president, an extension of his heart, an extension of his soul, and an extension of his hands.
Of all the talents and qualified people in Nigeria, these ministers are the people President Tinubu has selected; if you look at the time it took Tinubu to come out with this cabinet, it shows you that in his mind, these are the best people he can get in the present circumstances, and that alone will let you know whether the voters made the right decision when they voted for Tinubu during the presidential election in February.
It is not for anyone, more so someone like me, who lost the election to him, to start telling him who he should assign to specific ministries but what is clear is that a Prince Adewole Adebayo presidency would have been diametrically different from this Tinubu presidency.
What Nigerians are experiencing now and what they are going to enjoy or endure during this Tinubu presidency will be Tinubu’s philosophy, his mindset, world vision, outlook, attitude, temperament, motivation and aspirations reflected through the ministers.
For instance, the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, who said he is going to demolish this and that is a branch of Tinubu’s presidency, and any other thing you see him or any other minister do should be regarded as Tinubu in motion. However, the ministers have just been sworn-in, let us allow them to settle in. Suffice it to say that if I were the President, these ministers would not be the names you will see as members of my cabinet, but I am not the president.
The cabinet is a large one, perhaps the largest since 1999, is that not a drain on the economy especially with the economic downturn and huge cost of governance? Again, despite this, the South East geopolitical zone is complaining that the region was short changed, what do you say to that?
When you say the South East is complaining, how did those appointed ministers get their appointment as South East representatives? Who was there at the opinion poll to select them? That some people in the South East are complaining does not mean that the South East is complaining. I am sure that if you go to the South East and ask them what their priorities are, chances are that the top ten priorities would not relate to being members of Tinubu’s cabinet.
And, if you do a cost analysis of governance in Nigeria, you will see that the cost of governance does not come from personnel costs in government. Our cost of governance comes from corruption and other leakages.
Nigerians should know how their monies get missing. Whether you have 37 ministers or you have 47 ministers or even 100 ministers, just know that what are driving the cost of governance is waste, corruption, opaqueness, abandoned projects, contractual influence, white elephants, and other wrong-headed policies.
More importantly, you must know the cost-benefit ratio in what the nation gains from engaging a public servant and what the country spends on that public servant.
Are you saying for example that with the parlous state of foreign exchange, with the parlous state of monetary policy, with the parlous state of gross domestic product (GDP), that if the President were to bring in five more ministers who are experts in different fields and can attract $200 billion into the economy by way of foreign injection of funds, and can raise our GDP by an additional $300 billion, would we say that the ministers are too many? Or, if for instance we gather 37 unintelligent people with no vision or purpose, people who cannot even govern their departments correctly, cannot capture government revenue correctly, cannot administer correctly and cannot stimulate productivity, would we say that we are saving costs because the cabinet is lean? It does not work that way. There are many ungoverned spaces in Nigeria where the government needs to show presence and there are many programmes that are naturally and constitutionally the duty of government but are not covered. We should not worry about the size of the government, rather we should worry about the quality of the cabinet.
What would you say is the quality of this Tinubu cabinet?
Some of the designations of the ministries are a bit fanciful, hyperbolic and conflicting. There are about three ministries that have innovation in their name. So, the implication is that the government’s centre of innovation is not clear.
The definition of blue economy in the government is truncated because there is a Ministry of Agriculture which is controlling fishery, and fishery is almost one third of the blue economy. How can you call somebody Minister of Mines and Blue Economy and he does not control fishery? There are so many head-butting designations that show that they just sat down one place and reeled out names. But, designation of ministries and departments are executive prerogative of the President, so Tinubu can always correct the gaps. I think he has already done something with regard to the verbosity of the Ministry of Environment by just calling it environment. He can give guidance to the line departments so that they do not get confused as to which minister or which ministry they report to, so that strategic mandates does not appear to be in purgatory, being neither here nor there by way of designation and do not get lost in the cracks.
The problem with analysing, commenting, criticizing, or advising Tinubu’s government is that they are not committing to any broad target, they just talk transactionally and opportunistically without committing to any economic target.
How do you mean they are talking transactionally and opportunistically?
There is a ministry primarily named after poverty but what is their plan for holistic handling of poverty, for arresting the multidimensional aspects of poverty? Alleviating poverty is not just about getting bags of rice and sending them to one local government. If we are serious as a country, we can actually measure our poverty and see the metric of poverty and then develop algorithms that can help us address poverty. If we do that, we can then see the gap between what we need to address poverty and the current capacity that we have.
If we will know the gap, we will know what to do and how to work towards addressing it. So those are the things that you need to do to measure whether a cabinet will work or not.
But the thing is that as soon as you declare someone as president-elect, you have sealed the fate of the country because executive powers are vested in that president. The government does not start when the ministers were appointed and sworn-in, the government started when the president was inaugurated. All the things that the ministers do revolve around the gravitational orbit of the president. The ministers may be able to sway the president one way or the other, especially if they are collectively driven towards excellence, then the president might be moved. Otherwise, if they are dealing with the president individually with different idiosyncrasies at different directions, then it is more likely that the presidency will be the one influencing them, as they will just be nothing more than remote-controlled persons whose main effort will be on how they will be in the good book of the presidency.
Those are things which are the dynamics for every presidency but Nigerians should not expect a cabinet that doesn’t resemble Tinubu’s priorities.
Is it possible that the ministerial list submitted to the Senate without portfolio could be responsible for the ministers’ inability to make commitments during the screening?
That is not the whole of it, look for instance at somebody who was talking about the economy. If you are talking about the economy, you must have macro-economic statistics, you must be able to say why the ideal interest or inflation rate should be at a certain number; this way you will know what you are working towards and be able to make projections and set monetary and fiscal targets.
A ministerial nominee should be asked critical questions, pertaining to making a determination as to his level of familiarity with his duties, and his being conversant with the challenges that he is actually going to face, that is how we better our democracy.
The press also has a role to play in this, that is why a larger than life, a heavier than ordinary responsibility is given to the media in the constitution.
That is why of all the professions in the country, the law profession and the media profession are the ones given constitutional pharmacy.
The constitutional thinkers know that without the rule of law, there is no democracy and they know that without open discussion and accountability, there is no democracy. So the two professions, the law profession and the media profession should never underestimate their relevance in ensuring that democracy works.
You mentioned distributing bags of rice as a way to alleviate poverty; the president has approved N5billion and some trailer loads of rice per state to cushion the effects of fuel subsidy removal, what is your take?
The only fact there is that they are moving monies around between the federal and state governments without any official government policy paper to tell you what the monies moving around are about. You only hear side talks and official pronouncements by staff that are not in charge of those programmes.
When you hear from the governors, they tell you it is a loan, when you hear from people in the ministry, they tell you that it was part of the 2023 budget, and when you hear from presidential spokespersons, they claim it as a credit, especially when it intersects with their discussion with the labour union on the issue of yet-to-be declared industrial dispute regarding fuel subsidy removal.
So, if you are not careful, you will be running commentary on invalid points.
What is your take on the administration’s handling of the fuel subsidy removal?
As far as I am concerned, there is no articulated policy from the Tinubu presidency addressing fuel subsidy or fuel subsidy removal regime. The only thing that comes close to a policy suggestion is the presidential committee set up on the use of compressed natural gas (CMG), and CMG is not a new technology, it is more than 30 years old. I know because I used CMG on my Mercedes car 30 years ago here in Nigeria. If you go to No 8, Rostrel Road, now called Ojoma Road in Ikoyi, Lagos close to Alagbon, you will see a CNG plant commissioned by Tinubu when he was governor of Lagos State, so there is nothing new in that presidential committee. In the period between being elected in February and the Transition Council from March, and since they knew that fuel subsidy is going and that we need alternative fuel, what did they do? I could have given them a plan within three months to convert a million vehicles. Those are the things that I can say that looks like a policy point that they can pursue, and if they pursue it well, it will be an alternative to petrol that relieves people and it can create a new industry where people who sell the CNG canisters can spread across length and breadth of Nigeria motorways.
But I can say the government has no plan yet on poverty alleviation, the trailer loads of rice they went to send to the states are a reflection of how they campaigned before the election and procured and re-bagged rice and put campaign pictures on them to share at wards and local government and by the time it gets to the end user, only one in 20 people gets a handful of rice that hardly lasts one day. It is an embarrassment if that is what they call governance but I pray to God Almighty for them to succeed.
Would the switch from PMS to CMG not adversely affect availability of domestic cooking gas?
Gas is not a problem in Nigeria, we have more gas in our reserve than the total GDP of the United States of America (USA). We have the gas, all we have to do is to go to the gas field, wean the gas, scrub the gas, pipe the gas, and in the case of CNG, compress the gas for locomotive use. You take a container and pressurize the gas into the container. A typical vehicle can use a canister for a whole week, running around, depending on the size of the canister that the vehicle carries.
The form in which we condition gas for use in the kitchen is not the form in which we condition gas for use in vehicles. If the gas sources are well taken care of, we can have enough. Of course, in terms of logistics, there will be times when, just like we have petrol scarcity, we may experience gas scarcity, if you have debris in the pipeline or the pipeline is broken or the gas is not properly scrubbed, and water enters the pipe or something like that or there is an industrial accident.
The use of gas is natural and it is cleaner and it is abundant in the country and you don’t need to refine it, gas is almost usable in natural state, all you need to do is just to have a way to contain it. The only thing about gas is that once it is off the ground, it costs you money to keep it. Otherwise, it will vaporize or mix with the environment.
NNPC limited recently took a $3billion loan from the African Export-Import Bank (Afrexim Bank) of Egypt to shore up support for the national currency and stabilise the exchange rate, what’s your take on that?
It is routine. Last year, about $5.7 billion was taken from the same bank. It is routine for them because they run out of reserves, they run out of money and like any entity that has a stream of income, they leverage on it and borrow ahead. They have been doing it for some time. People who watch the NNPC and the Central Bank know that they do this regularly.
So if they don’t want them to continue with the practice, then we need to manage our resources in a better way.
But if they fitter away all their operational income, and they have obligations, they tend to borrow.
Sometimes, NNPC might need to pay money to the Central Bank on behalf of its shareholders, which is a federation account, and it may have mismanaged or run out of liquidity, it will just borrow and then pay the Central Bank. The Central Bank will now say, we have a reserve, we have an additional reserve and then print more Naira. Sometimes they print a lot of Naira without any dollar backing or forex backing, then all that new Naira will be chasing the little forex that remains.
It shows to you that they are under pressure because both fiscally and monetarily, that is both in terms of fiscal value and expenditure of government, and in the management of money supply, which is the monetary side of it, there is a serious anaemia in the country.
For a population of our size, the Federal Government doesn’t seem to be able to carry out its mandate under Chapter 2 of the Constitution. We need to be budgeting up about $300 to $350 billion every year, but we budget in $30s and a lot of the budget even has no cash backing; besides that, outside the budget, they waste three or four times our amount in terms of other interventions that are outside the budget. So they are mismanaging the resources, essentially.
Let’s look at the developments in Niger Republic. You have severally said that Nigeria and Niger are brothers, now there are some concerns that ECOWAS of which Tinubu is President of the comity of Heads of State and Government is on standby for a military action, what are your concerns?
It is wrong to say that ECOWAS is preparing for war. What ECOWAS has only said is that Niger Republic signed to the ECOWAS protocol that you will only change your government democratically.
Whatever is the issue in your country, you sign a protocol in this community that you will not change government by force. Therefore, you have to go back and correct it. And if you don’t correct it democratically, we will not recognise you, and we will see any non-democratic change of government as interlopers under the constitution of your country, and under the community document that we all signed to.
Niger has helped to implement the protocol before. Niger Republic went with ECOWAS to remove Yaya Jami in the Gambia, Niger went to Sierra Lone, Niger went to Liberia, Niger went to Cote d’Ivoire to support the use of force to remove Laurent Gbagbo and install Alassane Quattara. The same Niger joined in the condemnation of Mali and Burkina Faso and Guinea when they had the coup in their respective countries. So, we need to understand that ECOWAS cannot give a round of applause to someone who is in violation of the ECOWAS treaty and protocol and ECOWAS cannot be indifferent either; ECOWAS is also engaging with the co-brother and constitutional government that has been deposed. ECOWAS is opening some humanitarian corridor; that is why the country has not collapsed.
If ECOWAS had wanted to wage war on Niger, they would have done it and Niger would not survive it. Niger is a very small army compared to Nigeria and the rest of West Africa. But the deadline passed and they are still engaging them. That is diplomacy. But definitely anything done in support of bringing in the culture of democracy is always good for a polity.
We suffered under Abidjan for decades in Nigeria. And all the promises of radicalism and everything, none of it was delivered, and a coup always leads to a counter coup.
So the fact that there is a coup and some people say they are anti-French, they are anti-colonial domination, they are pro-Russia, they are pro-this doesn’t mean that there won’t be a counter coup tomorrow. That will help the pro-French, pro-this and then you have crisis.
If you take power by election, there will be another election that will take you out. If you take power through a coup, there will be another coup that will take you out, nothing is permanent. So, what we want to create in West Africa at least is a democratic system.
If you think the President in Niger Republic is pro-French president and a boot-licker of the West, who does not take care of the affairs of his people, that can only motivate you to elect another one who is not pro-French and who is not a boot-licker and who is nationalistic.
So I think that it’s a complex thing, but Nigeria has to lead, and we are leading it, and I think at the level of regional diplomacy, we are taking the right step. ECOWAS is speaking the way Nigeria is speaking, and African Union is speaking the way ECOWAS is speaking.
So people don’t understand that a democracy does not just guarantee you that the person elected will be a good person. It guarantees you that even if you are a bad person, you can live with it, your liberty will not be attacked, you will not be constrained. If you are suffering, you can at least speak out and that the person in power will have a limited tenure. No matter how good or bad they are, they will go. Those are not the things you can throw away. People think that you want to fight imperialism by authoritarianism; imperialism itself is happier with authoritarianism. If you allow authoritarianism in your system, the imperialists have difficulty manipulating democratic systems because it costs them more time, more attention, more resources to manipulate your election and your leaders. But if you revert to authoritarianism, it is easy for them. They have the biggest guns. They will just bring one gun and then it takes over your country.
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