If the situation were not as serious as we have it at the moment, one would have been content to sit back to enjoy the self-serving remonstrations of an elite class for whom everything begins and ends with politics. It’s been a week of brickbats between the PDP governors and the Bola Tinubu administration on the one hand and, the perennial presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar versus the Tinubu administration on the other, with the PDP governors only wrapping up a rather tumultuous week with an encore.
The PDP governors are obviously convinced that the Tinubu administration is not doing nearly enough. Ever sly but barely magisterial in their outings, they have availed Nigerians a surfeit of proof: The naira – against the major international currencies – doing the yoyo spectacle. Food prices – not shortages please –reaching the skies and the neighbourhood, surfeit with an army of angry youths who simply can’t find anything meaningful to lay their hands on. And so they whined on and one like school children sent to undertake the day’s business without the accompaniment of their learning tools, forgetting that the problems being complained about are theirs and theirs to solve!
And for these they want the president – not their membership club of predatory abdicators – to resign!
Reminds yours sincerely of those days of yore when as a young staff writer in the National Concord, I alongside other colleagues went on tour of health establishments in Lagos with the late Minister of Health, Prof Olikoye Ransome-Kuti. At a stop in one federal medical facility, the officer in charge had ranted on and on about poor funding and how that was impacting on service delivery. He even dared to draw the minister’s attention to the long stretch of overgrown weeds threatening to turn the facility into a mini jungle only for the minister at this point to ask whether the facility had a labourer on its payroll! Of course, the director could only return an incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo about lack of critical equipment to rid the place of the weeds! In effect, the minister merely stopped short of saying that the problem is not so much about lack of funds but of the critical initiatives to get the job done.
That same spirit – of corporate abdication – is unfortunately in full bloom with the governors eyes all set upon Abuja!
Here of course is the irony: while the same governors trading blames have been smiling to the banks, sacrificing every single initiative of the Tinubu administration aimed at providing succour through their offices to sheer incompetence or political expediency; they forget, that the twin policies of fuel subsidy removal and foreign exchange reforms, which although painful for the citizens, has actually delivered far more positive outcomes to their treasuries and potentially for real governance than most of their whining lordships could ever have imagined.
If there is any missing element, it must be their collective failure to articulate a programme of collaboration with the federal government to mitigate the pains on the citizens and to shorten the duration of the current adjustment. For that, the governors can rightly be accused of monumental abdication in a grave moment of emergency.
However, unlike the governors who are in pole position to do something, the case of former vice president Atiku Abubakar is different. He understandably does not think much of the president let alone the policies of his administration, two positions of which he is eminently entitled. Atiku, interestingly, does not suffer a misapprehension of the issues at stake even if appears sometimes confused. Most certainly, he believes that he understands the problems more than anyone and perhaps that he alone possess the magic wand to solve them.
Hear him: “The wrong policies of the Tinubu administration continue to cause untold pain and distress on the economy and the rest of us cannot keep quiet when the government has demonstrated sufficient poverty of ideas to redeem the situation.
“After a careful assessment of the state of our economy at the twilights of the last administration, I knew full well that the economy of the country was heading for the ditch and came up with a number of policy prescriptions that would rescue the country from getting into the mess that we are currently in.”
And so his premises/options:
(1) A fixed exchange rate system would be out of the question…it would not be in line with [our] philosophy of running an open, private sector-friendly economy.
(2) Operating a successful fixed-exchange rate system would require sufficient FX reserves to defend the domestic currency at all times…He agrees that Nigeria’s major challenge is the persistent FX illiquidity occasioned by limited foreign exchange inflows to the country.
(3) He says “A managed-floating system would have been a preferred option… in such a system, the naira may fluctuate daily, but the CBN will step in to control and stabilize its value. Such control will be exercised judiciously and responsibly, especially to curb speculative activities.”
Imagine the individual who in one breadth pledged to reform the foreign exchange market by eliminating multiple exchange rate windows, which, he claimed, only benefited opportunists, middlemen, and fraudsters, bent on retaining the very infrastructure which gave it prop.
That is vintage Abubakar, the acclaimed author and finisher of the Obasanjo-era reforms that have berthed in the current disaster that the country is only now, beginning to slowly but painfully extricate itself.
Surely, Atiku can go on theorising as many times as he wants. Just like his co-traveller, the acclaimed trader and fabulist that swears that he alone has the magic wand to move Nigeria from consumption to production, he is free to speak from both sides of the mouth. Clearly, the man Nigerians elected to solve the problem is Bola Tinubu. While things might seem rough at the moment, the way forward surely cannot be a return to the old economy of rent and privilege but one in which level playing ground is availed to all classes of players. The two albatrosses of subsidy of fuel and multiple exchange rates belong to the ancien regime. We need to educate the throng still nursing the illusion of quick-fixes that the answer to the plummeting value of the naira is to encourage exports to boost the supply of forex.
As for the governors, do they need Tinubu to tell them of the dire need to revive those farm settlements, the agricultural extension services of old, the site-and-service initiatives that took the drudge off the farming enterprise as a strategy only to rekindle the interests of our youths in agriculture? Come to think of it – is the job all about ‘forming’ the big man through the elite Nigerian Governors Forum?
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