Dateline: January 2, 2024. While the global exchanges of compliments in celebrating the season were flowing at their peak, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was assenting to the 2024 budget with an infectious upbeat mood, and at a ceremony which had in attendance the leadership of the National Assembly. Tinubu’s upbeat mood apparently conveyed the optimism and zeal with which he had nursed the N28.7 trillion budget package, just as it seemingly constituted the success key to his presidential campaign agenda of Renewed Hope for Nigerians. It was with the same disposition that he had pursued the entire process of seeing the budget package through the legislative mill in the National Assembly, including scoring a record first of having it passed in just one month (November 29-December 30, 2023), instead of the regular three months for previous budget exercises. If for nothing else, the dispensation hopefully signposts a new era of possibly, faster- tracked processes of governance, in the coming days and years, under President Bola Tinubu.
With this development, the Tinubu administration has reached another major landmark in its seven-month life, given that this is the first full year budget after coming on stream, and after the N2.2 trillion supplementary budget of October 2023, which he also assented to along with Budget 2024, and will now run along with the former until March 31, 2024. The development also offers the various MDAs under the Presidency, the opportunity to deliver to Nigerians, the very policy initiatives and ingredients that will translate the Renewed Hope agenda into deliverables. They now have to show Nigerians their respective responses to ameliorate the harsh day to day realities of living in the country. Tinubu’s upbeat mood should therefore remain well-placed if it predisposes him to drive governance towards lifting the mood of Nigerians in any part of the country – from Lagos to Maiduguri and Calabar to Sokoto, and thereby induce a buy-in by them into his Renewed Hope Agenda. All Nigerians have to offer the administration now is, wait and see.
Even as he inherited an economy that has been variously described in unflattering terms, Budget 2024 offers the framework for the renewal of hope for Nigerians, by leading the government to do things differently from past dispensations. And the way to go for Tinubu is to predispose his presidential team to strive as much as possible towards going local – that is taking service delivery beyond the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and other urban locations, to the hinterland as much as possible. Let governance under Tinubu spread to the wider expanses of the country. Let the 36 states and 774 Local Government Areas across the country serve not just as the basis for allocating funds in budget considerations, but by the quantum of intervention by the Federal Government in them, also be the net performance indicators of how much hope is being renewed and restored, at any point in time.
The basis for such a contention stands on several premises including the following three. First is the fact that the targets of the Renewed Hope agenda are Nigerians, and these live mostly in the hinterland, not only in Abuja or other urban areas that may attract more attention of government. Hence any programme designated for their upliftment needs to be directed at them in their bases, and nowhere else.
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Second is the humongous trove of glaring evidence that the Renewed Hope agenda owes its success to the revival of the productive enterprise of the same Nigerians who are residing in the hinterland where the productive bases of the real sector of Nigeria’s agrarian economy – farms, ranches, pens, forests, rivers, lakes and cottage industries are located. This point conjures a recall of the immediate past administration which touted the mantra of Nigerians consuming what they produce, and producing what they consume. Yet that expectation hardly left the terrain of sloganeering, with the present Tinubu dispensation likely to tow the same line, except it goes local as advocated here. A renewal of hope for Nigerians under Tinubu needs to start with predisposing the citizens to consume what they produce, and produce what they consume.
As is trite knowledge, given the mostly agrarian nature of the Nigerian economy, any plan to lift the country out of its present depressed state will fail, unless the productive enterprise of the grassroots in the country is revived. The foregoing consideration enjoys further credence as the most grievous faces of the country’s economic crisis are with respect to paucity of locally producible provisions. And it does not require the endowment of clairvoyance to appreciate that whatever damage to the economy derives from the elitist rather than populist orientation of past budget implementation efforts.
Third is that the pains of the dip in the economy – especially with the removal of subsidy on petrol price, was most pronounced in the long-abandoned rural areas where the grassroots of the population dwell and who survive solely on subsistence ways of living. The only reason for their poverty is their unjustified economic exclusion by the powers that be, even with their endowments to lift the country, if availed the wherewithal.
In the light of the foregoing considerations, the choice before Tinubu with respect to the fortunes of Budget 2024 remains self manifest – Go Local and direct governance to prioritise the revival of the hinterland. This consideration calls for a more robust interface between the MDAs under the federal government and the state as well as local government authorities.
Already, it is heartwarming that the contingent circumstances under which Budget 2024 was processed, passed and assented to, generated commendable camaraderie between the National Assembly and the executive arm of government. This welcome dispensation offers the inpetus to take the bridge-building effort further towards closer interfacing between the Presidency and the other tiers of governance which are closer to the grassroots.
Such is a surefire vote for the success of Budget 2024, and a boost for the Renewed Hope agenda.
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