“Tinubu’s Economic Highway To Hell”

“Tinubu’s Economic Highway to Hell”

Two common slogans embraced by the Bola Tinubu administration are “reforms” and “market forces”. Every day, the public is assailed by the cacophony of government officials and APC’s apparatchiks mounting the slogans in the midst of the unprecedented hardship under which the people are being buried.

Some of them say we’re paying the price of the failure of past governments to take the bull by the horns and carry out reforms with the attendant pains. Therefore, we should endure the hardship and even thank the administration for doing the very needful. Nirvana, they assure us, will inevitably be the outcome of the ‘creative destruction’ that Tinubunomics is inflicting on the country.

In nine years, Nigeria has been badly diminished by incompetent and insular leadership. And there’s no letup in the mad drive to take the country to the very bottom.

Let’s be clear about this: there’s nothing creative in the wreckage that has been wrought in the past 15 months, which the country is reeling from. The so-called reforms that have brought the country low, ignominiously demoting it from Africa’s largest economy to fourth (behind South Africa, Egypt and Algeria), have been haphazardly formulated and are being implemented same way. This kind of approach to reforms reflects more of ad hocery than a serious attempt to change the way the country is governed and the economy managed.

This conclusion about the haphazard nature of President Tinubu’s ‘reforms’ is borne out by the absence of a plan underpinning them. Any government that’s really committed to reforms should have a plan for not only implementing them but mitigating the impact of the deleterious consequences on the public. Fifteen months into his presidency, there’s no plan – and seemingly none in the works – that lays out a roadmap to achieve the one-trillion-dollar GDP in five years as, Wale Edun, finance and co-ordinating minister of the economy, gleefully announced last year.

It’s, indeed, deeply ironic that, having reduced the country’s GDP from $362 billion to about $258 billion in 15 months with their ‘reforms’, they’re talking about growing it to $1 trillion dollars in five years. This would have been hilarious if a comedian had invented it as a joke. But coming from the finance minister and other top administration officials, it speaks to the ad hocery that has been the hallmark of the government.

It’s a basic fact that serious industrialisation, general development and growth of an economy is driven majorly by accessible and affordable power. Of the top five African economies, Nigeria’s, which is the fourth largest, has the lowest daily power output at approximately five thousand megawatts with a fragile transmission grid that’s always collapsing. If power generated with generators by companies, big and small, and individuals are added to the five thousand, what we have is possibly between eight and ten thousand megawatts.

Obasanjo carried out reforms without spreading mass poverty and pains. In fact, those reforms not only energized the economy, it led to the emergence of a fairly sizable middle class.

So, how will the ambitious quantum GDP growth be achieved in five years without adequate and reliable power supply? It’s, therefore, obvious that the $1 trillion projection is yet another pie-in-the-sky promise by a party notorious for its mendacity. The bigger the lie and its constant repetition, the better to distract us from the party’s failure to deliver the positively consequential change it first promised in 2015.

There’s definitely been change but of the worst kind unimaginable before the party got into power. From “change” to “renewed hope”, the country’s present trajectory is fundamentally wrong and the story unsavoury. In nine years, Nigeria has been badly diminished by incompetent and insular leadership. And there’s no letup in the mad drive to take the country to the very bottom.

Since 2015, APC has succinctly demonstrated that it’s a most lethal weapon of mass destruction and impoverishment. Ending fuel subsidy and floating the naira simultaneously is unqualified economic insanity. It reflects the shallow thinking behind the reforms that have gone completely awry.

It’s clear that floating the naira has wrecked it, with the attendant soaring inflation rendering its purchasing power almost useless.

The naira is suffering death by a thousand cuts from policy miscues, misalignment and gross mismanagement. Its purchasing power has been very badly decimated. It’s now the butt of acerbic jokes even among Nigerians victimized by its destruction and despised all over Africa.

The reckless policy of floating the naira means that prices of imported goods will go up whenever it dives downward against the American dollar and other major international currencies. Some of our major imports are petroleum products. And the lack of a stable exchange rate continues to create price distortions especially on petrol.

In just one month, NNPC increased its price twice. The latest one came last week with petrol now selling at a national average price of ₦1,200 per liter. The justification or explanation for the increase was that subsidy was finally gone. Government and NNPC spin doctors said market forces would now be the sole determinant of the price. In 15 months, petrol price has increased from a base price of about ₦200 to ₦1,000 per liter. And this has left raging inflation in its wake, leading to mass hunger.

Indermit Gill, World Bank’s vice president, reminded the tone-deaf Tinubu administration at the 30th Nigeria Economic Summit in Abuja, that Nigeria now has the world’s highest number of people living in extreme poverty. Vice President Kashim Shettima shook his head in apparent consternation as Gill laid out the cold facts about their reforms.

A true leader inspires the people by personal example and sacrifices. He walks his talk. In this regard, Tinubu is a woeful failure.

Obasanjo carried out reforms without spreading mass poverty and pains. In fact, those reforms not only energized the economy, it led to the emergence of a fairly sizable middle class. But that middle class was steadily reduced between 2016 and 2023. What was left of it has been virtually eviscerated in the last 15 months.

Those who talk of allowing market forces to determine the value of the naira and prices of petroleum products are either disingenuous, crassly insensitive or both. They forget that Nigeria is the epitome of chaos with a dysfunctional polity and even more dysfunctional economy.

It’s clear that floating the naira has wrecked it, with the attendant soaring inflation rendering its purchasing power almost useless. And a weak purchasing power spells trouble for companies producing goods and services. Less demand means business failures and mass layoffs. This is just basic economic reality. Only those who glibly talk of market forces pretend not to know this.

And where’s the minimum wage for workers? The ₦70,000 is now worth far less than its value when Labour and the federal government signed off on it two months ago. And apart from Edo State, the federal government and 35 states are yet to start paying it.

And since the agreement was reached, fuel price has been increased twice, violating the promise the government made to Labour that got them to accept ₦70,000 as minimum wage.

President Tinubu says we all should make sacrifices by bearing with him and enduring the pains of his reforms. He says he knows what he’s doing and why he’s doing it, and that, in the end, the country will be better for it and we’ll smile again.

But he’s exempted himself from the sacrifices he’s asking Nigerians to make. His new fleet of expensively customized official cars and new Airbus A330 twin-engine, wide-body presidential jet shows his hypocrisy and imperial pretensions.

The presidential jet he discarded, a Boeing 737-700 series, bought brand new and used by his predecessors – Obasanjo, Umaru Yar ’Adua, Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari – wasn’t good enough for him. He ordered one that’s more grandiose. The A330-300, when configured for commercial operation, can carry over 300 passengers in three different classes. This is nothing but vanity with a capital V.

A true leader inspires the people by personal example and sacrifices. He walks his talk. In this regard, Tinubu is a woeful failure. He and his buddies in government are still living large after creating an economic highway to hell for the rest of us.

He needs to be reminded of his admonition to President Goodluck Jonathan in January 2012. He had opposed Jonathan’s decision to end subsidy, and he wrote an open letter to the president about it. He said, among other things, that Jonathan “is a slave to wrong-headed economics”.’ And because of that, “the people will become enslaved to greater misery…. This crisis will bear his name and will be his legacy.” He concluded that while reforms were needed, “they must have a human face.”

Those around him say he’s doing what others before him failed to do. Same person who opposed Jonathan’s reforms, including subsidy removal, purely for political expediency and to position himself as the people’s champion. So, where’s the human face in his own reforms?

Email: nosaigiebor@tell.ng

Phone: 0807 629 0485 (WhatsApp & SMS only).

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