Wasting Tinubu’s altruism

Under normal circumstances, nobody should be blaming Bola Ahmed Tinubu for where the country is right now. Except that the man, like other global leaders, applied for this job. According to INEC that acted as HR, he impressed the people and they gave him more votes than his two closest rivals. Truth is that there is a global recession, and even powerful countries are feeling the bite of the economy. The only difference being that most of these countries have a solid foundation.

Coming out of almost four years of a global pandemic, the logical thing to do would have been to recoup and regrow the global economy. However, if the world followed that logical path, capitalism could crumble. So, it looked for a crisis to keep itself occupied and Russia obliged it, when after annexing Crimea, it went ahead to attempt to rein in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s mortal sin was not just hobnobbing with capitalist nations, it was seeking alliance with NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Russia under Putin was struggling to reverse the hurried and harried programmes of the Glasnost and Perestroika years. To have a NATO member sitting just by its nose would have been strategically suicidal. So Russia warned the clown-turned-president Vladimir Zelensky against the move. Like a lazy son who rushes home to hide from a bully, Zelensky rushes to the West. Russia rushed in, poking the nose of its mortal enemies.

The war in Ukraine, or what the capitalist media calls the invasion has increased global problems while putting smiles on the faces of arms manufacturers and their shareholders. While the shares in strategic arms companies have soared since the invasion, the prices of oil and basic foodstuff has increased. Ukraine used to be a strategic grain supplier; the war has crippled that capacity.

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It is a game that Nigerians in the northern part understand. Since the entry of Boko Haram and their strategic alliance with kidnappers and cattle rustlers, northerners, and indeed greater Nigeria, have signed a pact with hunger. It is not Tinubu’s design to see the national currency, the naira, become worthless than the proverbial toilet paper. According to the papers he declared, Tinubu is an accountant, not an economist.

While taking over from Muhammadu Buhari, he had been told that if he would lead a good nation, he would have to make tough decisions. They sold him out on subsidy that has become a big issue since Nigeria returned to its wasteful presidential system of governance. Like his closest rivals, Tinubu believed that the subsidy created more avenues for corruption than whatever gain it was supposed to bring. He dropped that ball and stood by the decision. If he had been an economist, he could have foreseen the consequences of his action on that score, especially as the war in Ukraine destabilised things globally.

But, having made noise, to quote Omar Bongo on the issue, the subsidy has become an albatross on Tinubu’s administration. First, it has devalued the naira and increased the prices of goods and services. Caught in a bind, Tinubu has been panicky – assuring his friends that subsidy is gone, he does not want to make a policy somersault on the issue. It would be an act of valour for a leader to keep his word. Except that in this instance, it is not.

While all this is going on, Tinubu is fighting an epic battle of his own making – the mystery surrounding his emergence as a political leader, his antecedents in private and public life especially the qualifications he purported to have acquired. This is perhaps the worst time to be put on the defence at every point. The effect of that distraction is felt everywhere from announcing the appointment of nominees before weighing them on the balance only to pull them out at the last minute; to breaking with the law and norm by picking people with distracting baggage of their own.

One of such is a minister still undergoing the mandatory National Youth Service, in cabinet. The latest being the scandalous appointment and withdrawal of a fresh engineering graduate to head a strategic agency. Tinubu is expanding his retinue of aides because of the epic battle he is fighting to sustain his personal depositions.

Last week, conscious that the Supreme Court would be making a pronouncement on his emergence, Tinubu released a few jokers. First, he announced that he would be giving civil servants additional Udoji-style award for the next six months. Then he took the populist agenda a notch higher when he announced that the salaries withdrawn from striking university teachers and any worker on industrial action should be released back to them. He is also going to be sending tokens, to quote a popular dictum, to people on the list of the so-called amended social register. This register was compiled by his predecessor in office using a criterion that is unknown to the public.

If you ask political strategists, this is another forced populist policy aimed at currying the favour of the masses. The trouble is that the Nigerian economy could hardly afford any of these moves. Give it to him, Tinubu is an astute politician. Within the last month, he has increased his circle of the aides he was initially afraid to bring in without being accused of bloating the bureaucracy. Some, he has put in strategic boards and agencies, others, he has pushed to the office of his vice-president.

For now, they are strategic appointments aimed at replicating the infamous Buhari Media Organisation created to service his predecessor. Instead of having an external body tackling the unrelenting media bashing, Tinubu now has a group of tested in-house pundits within his cabinet that could be deployed to fight his battles without incurring extraneous or extra-budgetary expenditure.

Whether all these would help him in the end remains to be seen. As the prices of goods and services continue to skyrocket, established nations are finding ways to cushion the effect on their citizenry. The pump prices of petroleum products continue to rise and only slightly fall, even in established countries.

Lately in Canada, governments have been meeting with grocery store owners principally forcing them to keep the prices of essential goods within the reach of the common man. Its rebates have established and verifiable channels to reach their intended recipients.

In Nigeria, even after a presidential fiat opening the country’s economy to the hawks and the bulls, the national currency has continued to slide. In a country where mass transportation is completely inexistent, it would be difficult to cushion the effect of a sliding currency or cushion its impact on the prices of goods, including petroleum products. Once Nigerians wake up to a hike in the price of petroleum products, service providers will, sans hesitation jerk up the prices of transportation. This will inevitably lead to increases in the prices of commodities thereby wasting the foreign loans that Tinubu is splashing around like Father Christmas.

This honeymoon is unlikely to last. It would not be long when recipients of government largesse realise that their take-home pay is not enough to take them to the bus stop.