Some ministers only know the route to their offices – SDP’s Adebayo

In this interview, Adewole Adebayo, Presidential Candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 election, spoke on a wide range of issues. From economy to politics, current administration’s policies, security, among others.

With the present condition going in the country, from economy to judiciary, transportation, agriculture and many more. Given the fact that you wanted to president the affairs of this country when you contested the presidential election last year, what is your perspective 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 and the mentality and attitude to governance adopted by many of the political parties and contestants and one of whom is now our President and Commander In Chief. So, 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 everywhere who believe when they come in, they will have access to patronage of power and the artificial fight of who has the dominance of Nigerian political space. Is it my religion or yours? Is it your tribe or mine? Is it my zone or your zone?. Those things don’t impact on the lives of the people and don’t power the ship of state. Those were the issues that were dominant.

Even now, to get policy rich issues into the mainstream, you will get comments this by former this and that. Even when they don’t have policy disagreement, they will still have what the late Fela Anikukapo used to called yabis night at the shrine in those days. What the Nigerian political class has turned the entire four years to in yabis years. They just come, say what you like. Whether it is consistent with what you have done all your life. Just say whatever, 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. Life and property are safe. Governance is taking place even if the president doesn’t talk. If the civil service are delivering on services and they are meeting their targets. People have better electricity, better healthcare. If the rule of law is working through the judiciary. If the industry is working. Industry, this time, is in two branches-professional like lawyers, nurses and productive industry like manufacturing, agriculture, extractive industry. If those ones are working, whether people like your face or not, the evidence will be clear.

The government has also tried to put a number of policies in place but the manufacturing sector have complained that these policies aren’t working. Consumers in the electricity sector are kicking against tariff as it is affecting them heavily. 

The policies they are quarrelling over are their own policies. They have the same policies. The manufacturing association of Nigeria is almost like a historic society like manufacturing museum association of Nigeria because there are no industries anymore. If you look at the critical sector of the economy, no industry. 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 IMF is saying the government is not punishing you enough that they have not been able to get enough consensus for deeper reforms. IMF is calling you resource intense country. They change their language every time because they change consultants who use new words for them.

They are saying 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 5% to 20% of their revenue to pay interest on loans , they see it as stress. But none of the indices deal 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 standard, things would be worse because the errors they are committing now will make them to commit more .

What would you have done if you were in their shoes?

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

They haven’t formed government!
Yes. For example, naming three spokespersons for one man shows that they are just announcing names. You need to gather all the talent in the country, that should be your first duty. We have a problem in our constitution that says that only man is the government because section 5 of the constitution says all executive powers are vested in government. If you want to talk about government today, you can only talk about President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He is the only one lawfully in government.

What about state governors?

I am talking about the federal government because the states don’t run micro-economics. What they do is run their own state. They just collect money and spend. Because if the broad national issues being discussed, the president is the only executive. He has to bring talent from all over the country to form a cabinet which he hasn’t done. He has named some ministers. Many of them, the only thing they know is the route to their office. To engage issues on their mandate, it’s difficult. Apart from going to the weekly executive council meeting and somebody is asked to address the media. Go and track decisions they make in the federal executive council, majority of it are mere approvals, not policy. They are like tenders board. They have turned themselves into tenders board where contracts are taking to them once it’s 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, in terms of inflation, in terms of the debasement of the currency, they are not able to. Remember they have been talking about the fact they have gained more revenue.

Secondly, they need to take control of the security of the country.

In terms of the economic policy, what would you have adopted if it were you?
For the policy to be adopted. One: security. There us 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 spend the money you have on social investment. It’s in the news that about N123b UBEC money have not been able to accessed by states. That means if they have it, more children will be in school, you will be able to hire more teachers, the teachers will have to pay for food, accommodation, you grow the economy from there.
The government does three things when you are in charge of the economy, you control government spending at federal level, you control subsidiary spending at state and local government level, you control private sector spending because people will align their own investments to what the government policy is.

How would you get the revenue, this government says what they met was bad?

Revenue is a byproduct of governance. If you govern any space, revenue will come to that governance. The government is not essentially inland revenue. Government is not a revenue agency. Government is a service provision agency. It has series of agencies one of which collects taxes. When you have ungoverned spaces. For example, when you have vast roads if you travel across the country where you have trailers broken down all over the place. That is an opportunity to make money because if you build roadways and toll it, money will come. If you see this vast arable land which you are giving to LAKURAWA and these other agencies in the forest, all in the name of bandits, if you take control of these spaces and you put agricultural concerns there, produce will come and you generate revenue . If you employ people, doing social work, you will end getting PAYE from them. If you get industries to work with better interest rates, and incentives for industries which of course will pay VAT, pay workers salaries who will also pay taxes. There is no magic to governance than that. You cannot be shy to govern and be crying revenue. Revenue is not going to fall from the skies. Already they are squeezing the most put of the people. There is property tax in every sector. What they need to do is that the more you expand the scope of government, the more efficient you are in governance, the better use of government revenue you have. There used to be efficiency index when I was much younger. The people in government used to have coefficients they work with so that you can see the allocative efficiency analysis being done by ministry of planning. But now the civil servants have nothing to do except if the minister is coming on the corridor and they all come out to welcome.

What do you do to them, sack them or what?

No, no. You need to use them. They just know I am a civil servant and I am deployed to ministry X but there are no mandates.

Is this based on experience or assumption?

I interact with government agencies all the time. If you have family members in government, ask them if you are an assistant director, what project are you supervising? There is nothing.

Some of them?

Most of them. And that says a lot if I say most. There are people who are still alive and they will tell you what the civil service used to be like. Go talk to Philip Asiodu, Falae and co when they were 27/8 years old as assistant director, they have projects they are managing. I am giving you indices of where there is no governance. If you see the president and the number of cars following, walking up and down, it gives you an impression that governance is going on, but to govern, they need to use public servant to govern and you will now know how busy those public servants are will then tell you whether government is busy. When you say you federal controller of road in Benue, what do you do most of the time? There is no road bring built. No road being maintained. If you go to FERMA, what are they doing? Go to directorate of employment, they are not given new mandate. They just create new ministries and share money. Recently, they said 25m Nigerians got some amount of money, I have not seen any of them neither have you seen. And they cannot give you the metrics.

But we know that 25m is a drop in the ocean compared to our estimated number of 250m people.

If you have 10%, because it is not everybody who needs money. Let’s say you have poverty rate of about 70%, if you have 25m, it will come to at least about 15% to 20% of them. They should be feasible. All I am saying is that when you form a government and the government is running well, whether your policy agrees with mine or not, I will see that you are actually on ground, doing something I don’t agree with, but you are doing something. The failure of this government is that not only did I disagree with some of the policies they are mouthing, even the policies, they don’t have the executive capacity to run those policies. For example, you may disagree with counterpart funding for primary education, let’s say you disagree. Even those who agree with it are not able to get the programme going.

Why do you think it’s like that?

Conceptually, they don’t know what governance is. They assume that governance is accepting government building.

What precisely do you mean by forming government because as it stands, there is cabinet in place where there are ministers and 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, that doesn’t mean I am constructing roads. I am just taking an action. The fact you removed fuel subsidy doesn’t make is a proper policy because in policy analysis, policy has its origin, the objective you will to achieve, the counter measure, 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 policy. Of you go to the Central Bank, what is the policy? W e 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 impact on the lives of the people, that still does not amount to a well thought out policy.

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

We have listened to them and they are giving 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 coordinating the economy, then, the minister of finance is given the title as coordinating because in that their team, he has himself, minister of economic planning, because you don’t see them coordinating. The gentle man, brilliant doctor who is in ministry of health who is coordinating social welfare, he cannot even run hospitals, not talk of social welfare.

How do you mean he cannot hospitals?

He is qualified to treat diseases as doctor but when you are minister of health, one of the most efficient ministers of health in the history of Nigeria was Mallam Aminu Kano and he was not a doctor. Look at the records under Gowon, look at the maternal death rate, infant mortality rate, when Aminu Kano became minister and when he left. What I am saying is a brilliant lawyer may not be a good attorney general. A brilliant doctor may not be a good minister of finance or health etc. A good banker who is good at keeping your money may not be good to run an economy. I don’t blame any of them because some of them fell into that place from the sky. The president must have looked around the country and said I shortlist 25 people, the best of them for us is this particular person. So, if I see incompetent people in government, I just go back to the person who appointed them that what was the conversation leading to appointing them? What was on your mind while appointing them?

To show the inefficiency I am talking about. I know LAKURAWA for the past five years. They said they just discovered LAKURAWA. If you have been in government in Plateau State, you would have seen their activity when they were going to the mining site in Plateau and Nasarawa states. If you are a miner. I have a mining licence. When you have problem with your mine, you have decision to take, do you go to the police or the vigilante? And for LAKURAWA, they come from Mali, Chad and other places. They have difficulty speaking other languages but effective to hold your mine against people coming steal your mine product. So they have been around. So, you are not a good commander in chief if you telling me this kind moonlight story.

So you are insinuating that Obasanjo comment about Nigeria is right?

Obassnjo’s comment is right in some part. With due respect to Obasanjo, I have two problems with his intervention;  anything you have done before, don’t criticise somebody over it because they won’t listen to you because they would say you did the same thing. Secondly, if you change your mind because we learn everyday, 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 of not reforming INEC . I made a mistake in selling all these institutions that I sold NEPA, Nigeria Airways. You shouldn’t have sold them away because without that you cannot generate employment and run the economy. For example, why would you sell Nigerian Airways? Because they don’t have aircraft? Is aircraft 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, that’s a money on its own. All over the world, airliners are looking for places where you have right to fly to places, but he is no longer in government now. But he can come, keep the hypocrisy aside because hypocrite can still be right.

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

Yes. The state capture is correct. He gave a beautiful lecture at the Yale University at the Achebe lecture. 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 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, this people are now carrying it on and now we must all stop it. If a person used to be 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 bottom line is that the direction we have been taking since 1999 is not the right direction and that is why we have been having bad result. The difference is that Obasanjo had efficiencies. Obasanjo knows how to govern even when he had bad policy. He had presence of mind to govern, compare to those who are there now who don’t have presence of mind to govern. Obasanjo has the time to consult, has the ability to explain; he was not too much afraid of bringing talent 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 writing whatever they like.

So, who is proper?

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 if he impacts the economy. If the two of them are distracted by other things, the minister of information. I don’t see anything wrong in taking clarification because these things we are discussing, the normal routine in government because opinions must fly. You must agree or disagree, but the bottom line 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 interior. You can see that he is responding to policy issues himself, not a question of sending spokesperson and he is taking measure to guve the homeland services to the people.