In this interview, Presidential Candidate of Social Democratic Party in the 2023 election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, speaks on a wide range of issues
Virtually everything wrong in Nigeria is blamed on government. What is the role of citizens in terms of orientation and the need to do the right thing ?
I think everybody is trying to survive. You don’t grow an economy of survival mode, you grow an economy of productivity and creativity. So when you hire a person in Nigeria, you verily have hired your enemy because the pay you pay the person, cannot pay their rent, cannot pay their children’s education, cannot pay for food. So both of you, the employer and the employer lying to each other. If you see your secretary coming to work, dressed with lipstick and everything and the hair trimmed, if you just calculate head to toe, you know that she’s not buying all of these things from the money you are paying.
As President Tinubu is the president of Nigeria, you can go ask him whether if he looks at his own private secretary or the typist in the State House, whether he knows as an accountant that any of the workers in the Villa is surviving on their salary. So, right from the state house there’s a problem. So that’s why I said that we need fundamental adjustments and it can be done.?
We can go back to those days of Udoji(committee Report), cost of living allowance, some adjustment and then some investment in infrastructure such that you can afford to have the basic things that you need. And that’s why I keep talking to Nigeria about chapter two of the constitution. That is the map to greatness of Nigeria. So if you are lost, that is the GPs, go back to that chapter two. If we follow it, many of these problems will be resolved. There will be unity in the country, there will be order in the country. And you will not have a bank manager, you will not have a bank MD that is earning one million times the earning of a graduate in the bank.
So we need to make those changes before we can see real changes on the street. Our people are good people, but we don’t like failure. We are not the kind of people can submit to poverty. There are many countries that are endemic in poverty. They take it as their lot. But in Nigeria, your driver still wants his son to be a medical doctor like yours.
He wants his daughter to be a pharmacist like yours. He wants his youngest son to be a judge, so has to be a lawyer. So he’s looking for the money and is earning 50,000 a month that he wants to put his child not in government school. He knows the government school is not good.
He wants to put his child in a private primary school next to them where he’s paying N5000 every month from the 50,000 he is earning. But if you go to countries that are poor, they are just accept. Some will not go to school at all. But Nigeria is different.
So, that is why people, your driver may kidnap you because his budget is bigger than the salary. So with a very aggressive population like that, that they are not only aggressive at home, anywhere you go in the world, they will do anything to make money.
Because our educational system, both at home and in the public schools, is not teaching us citizenship, patriotism, certain moral code anymore, and our religious entity, whether it’s Islamic or Christianity, and mix of them and all that is itself cynical at this point.
It’s all another theater for profitiary and gaming power or influence.
We need to go back and produce better citizens to reward those citizens with exemplary leadership. The leaders cannot be doing what he says we should not do. If you say I should not be traveling abroad, why is the president traveling with a large crowd going to Qatar?
Do you think that the time allotted to the committee regarding the Orosanye Report is sufficient to accomplish the task of effectively merging and scrapping agencies to cut the cost of governance?
That it’s the minimum you can do because the know there’s a similar report in the England called the Cardbury Report. How long did it take England for parliament to enact report? Very quickly. This one has dragged for so long. It is long overdue. But it’s also a bit, it needs to be updated. I don’t want them to leave it in theory and still want to reform it and they won’t do anything. So let us implement it. It should be the starting point because in life, and that’s why mathematics is very important for leadership.
But beyond that, you have to go and deal with efficiencies, because once you scrap the agencies and you decapitate some of them and match them with the other, if you don’t have efficiencies within, then you have a problem.
And that’s where the qualitative aspect comes in. So the government should use this moment not only to implement Orosanye, but to go beyond that and enhance it.
I don’t see any reason why police cannot be under minister of interior. Because police, after all, the immigration was part of police before. Police service commission can merge with the service commission.
So that journey is continuous because there’s a government office that should be with the president, that monitors efficiencies in government, that treats government as if it’s a factory, where you check whether how many have you produced today, how many projects have you done?
So ministers should be undergoing that kind of Singaporean efficiency test, where you test whatever you do so you can do it. It’s a long journey.
Your take on the current finance embargo and what solutions can you provide on the matter. Do you think the government is on track with their response?
First and foremost, when it has to do with your government and any foreign entity, your government’s on track.
So just let us have the attitude first, because if Binance is being sanctioned by South Africa or sanctioned by Russia or sanctioned by USA or UK, you won’t find people of that country saying they want to take between their government and binance. They will take their government immediately. So what we need to understand is that binance, in operating in Nigeria, ought to know that they are the Nigeria’s territory. So first you must respect the law of the country.
Binance can say, which I can listen to them is to say, we have not broken any law of Nigeria, but whether the government has jurisdiction over binance, to question them, to sanction them, yes, the government does. The only thing binance can do is to get lawyers to say, look, we study your law very well. We have not broken them because Nigeria is a country of laws. So binance does not have a duty to help Nigerian government implement its policy.
The only duty binance has, like any other entity, is not to break any law in Nigeria. If you break any law in Nigeria, you are really going to be in soup with the government of Nigeria.
In fact, if you are flying over Nigeria airspace as a pilot, you can commit an offense even though you don’t land Nigeria. That is why when you are flying nowadays from Europe and you are coming to Nigeria, they don’t fly over Niger. They don’t disrespect Niger. Niger has no air system to bring down any aircraft.
Niger has no method of enforcing the law. The people just obey the law because Niger says, don’t fly over my airspace, full stop.
So it is good to let people know if we have friends abroad who are following us, our country, we should tell them that there are laws in our country and don’t come and break them. So government is right to question them.
But the government itself needs to stop its own criminality within the government because many of the crisis that you find in foreign exchange came from the state house and the central bank.
So the government itself stop being a criminal against his own laws, it will be a good example.
But it doesn’t mean that because the government of the country has to be perfect before you obey the law of that country. There’s no perfect government in the world.
And I believe Nigerians are patriotic people for the younger ones who were born at a time where they can’t really tell what patriotism actually means, I am sure they are learning.
There is this school of thought that says that if we increase the wages of workers, all our problems are going to be solved. On the labor wage demand, what exactly do you think the solution is to these perennial issues with organized labor?
First and foremost, there are things we need to understand in basic economics. Having more money does not guarantee you anything. Everybody who’s living today has more money than Julius Caesar. Anybody who’s living today has more money. Because at the time the entire British economy was not up to 1 billion pounds for the first 1000 years of her existence. Purchasing power is what is important. So what we should focus on is what the money can buy, not the volume of the money that is with the minimum wage.
How much my father earning when he married my mother was not earning 20,000 pounds at that time a year. So now can you pay anybody 20,000 naira a week and they will not be cursing you out.
But you have to increase the volume of housing available. You have to increase the volume of food stuff available. You have to increase the number of classrooms available. You have to increase the spaces available for productivity by making sure you ramp up production. As for organized labor, they are a subset of Nigerian political class. They don’t represent the workers.
I am not saying that to insult the present leadership or anything. No, it is just the structural part of it.
Before you can be a member of labor congress or TUC, you must have a job. And there are more people without job than people with job. So if you are unemployed, you are not a member of any labor union because it’s only for workers. So the challenge we are facing is how to put more people in the workforce. So they are not as representative as you think.
Secondly, productivity and things that can affect productivity. They are the things that labor supposed to be fighting for or against, not just wage control only. If government bringing a policy that is going to affect productivity, labor should know that job will be lost. That was the difference between Obama and Mit Romney when the election was decisive.
When you ask people of Michigan, who will you vote for? They will vote for Obama, who saved our jobs, not Mit Romney, who wrote an article, let Detroit be bankrupt. So, those workers are not voting according to ethnicity, religion or any politician that can give them money to mobilize them and settle their leadership, they are voting according to their interest. If you save General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, you have saved thousands of jobs, you have saved thousands of families, and you have saved millions of people.
So, I want labor to engage government more meaningfully, not to just be negotiating with 1 million per month.
What matters is, you must ensure that employment is higher and that unemployment is lower and that you support only a government policy or a government arrangement that is working towards full employment.
Because when you have more people in the workforce, you have a bigger labor base. There are more members of APC than other members of Labor Congress. There are more members of PDP than a member of Labour Congress because how many people are employed in the country? How many are all the civil servants combined? If you say you are road transport union, how many vehicles are on the road?
If you say you are a member of railway, how many trains, how many train drivers in Nigeria, how many doctors, how many hospitals do we have? Because the economy is shrinking relative to the exponential growth of the population. Where was Nubifi when government was selling all its banks? Where were all these people? So I want us to go back to that liberal movement of that time which is pro economy, pro productivity.
How can you close all the Textile factories? There will have been no Adam Oshiomole. Where are those textile factories around Aswani area., in Kaduna? Where are they today? That is what labor should be talking about. Why is it that the government is not employing people? That’s because government is not efficient by doing its duty. With due respect, as bad and as poorly performing as the government is, the labor movement as currently constituted is worse. The efficiency is worse.
So we need to have a systemic review of what we want to do. Go and study life of Tony Ben and those who came from labour movement in British politics, where they were going before they got derailed by Thatcherism and all of that. So we need to understand that the only way to solve the problem is to get people reproductive. And that’s what I’ve done my entire life.
I always intervene in sector by sector, whether I am interested in it, whether it’s profitable or not, to try to see if I can ignite productivity out of people.
So that’s why I have farms, anything that can bring people to be productive. And that is the direction we need to drive our government, don’t worry much about wages for the few. If there is no enough rice in the market and the government is paying it’s own staff 1 million per month, how does that make food available for the unemployed?
What are those who are not working for the government? Are you not seeing the system of which in Nigeria there’s no country that has it? So, there are many things we need to review. Labor should stop following government up and down over wages, deal with the core policy, deal with the issue of employment, with issue of purchasing power.
And the only connection between wages and price of goods is the cost of living allowance adjustment. If things are rising, you adjust. But you must come for the point of view of purchasing power. I can tell you as we speak today, there is not one single member of the federal civil service or state service that is living on their salary. Even President Tinubu is not living on salary.
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