President Tinubu’s Hurdles

 By Sunny Ikhioya

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu became the governor of Lagos State in May 1999, he was boisterous and full of enthusiasm, portraying him in the image of a super man. But it was not long before he was confronted by the reality on ground. This reality encapsulated among others things happening in the streets. Lagos was growing increasingly filthy with wastes and becoming unsafe for people. That was after the exit of his predecessor, the famous Brigadier-General Buba Marwa, whom everyone deemed had performed well. 

*Tinubu 

General Marwa’s success was attributed to two clear strategies: keeping the city safe through the introduction of ‘Operation Sweep'(which later transformed to Rapid Response Squad, RRS, under Tinubu) and clearing Lagos of filth.

On account of this, Marwa was well reported by the Lagos press, to the extent that he became the envy of his bosses in Abuja.  So when the critical Lagos press descended on him, Tinubu was forced to adjust his ways and quickly raised a team of eminent personalities to draw up a clear road map for the development of Lagos. 

Shortly after, things started happening with the introduction of the private-public partnership arrangement for waste disposal and a bigger focus on the Rapid Response Squad to tackle insecurity. It was a big win for Tinubu, to the extent that he was using road projects to sensitise citizens on the dividends of the tax payments that they were making to government. He was riding on this wave of glory before another controversy surfaced: his Chicago University certificate and others were being called to question, spearheaded by the iconic legal luminary, the late Gani Fawehinmi, SAN. 

It was a controversy that threatened the soul of Lagos, especially as the new Speaker of the Federal House of Representatives had just been removed from office for certificate forgery. It was tough and brutal, but at the end, Tinubu survived and went on to achieve a glorious reign in Lagos, serving the mandated two terms, from 1999 to 2007. 

Even the election tsunami of 2003 that removed the other  governors of his party in the South- West could not touch him. He remained the only one standing and years later was largely instrumental in the formation of the current ruling party, the All Progressives Congress, which succeeded in dethroning ruling the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, at the federal and state levels in 2015. 

Lagos State under him survived without federal allocations, withheld by the Olusegun Obasanjo government, for his audacity to create more local government councils in Lagos, without the backing of the federal government and the National Assembly. The matter was later settled by the Supreme Court. At the end of it all, Tinubu came out stronger, well accepted as the national leader of the APC. In fact, he made it clear that, but for him, Muhammadu Buhari wouldn’t have become President of Nigeria and everyone knows this as a statement of fact. 

So, I do not think the capacity to perform is Tinubu’s problem, because his record of perfance speaks for him, especially in revenue generation. When you have money, you can do many things. He is also renowned for choosing the right calibre of persons to drive his vision, comprising of young, upwardly mobile, cerebral individuals, in a hurry to prove their talents and dexterity. 

But that was 1999 when Tinubu himself was of a relatively younger age. We are in year 2023, a clear 24 years after. So, will he be able to ride the tempo amidst increasing waves of controversies? So far, he has succeeded with the pre-election challenges; he carried out a controlled campaign, expertly succeeded in hiding his weaknesses and he came out tops, according to the figures released by  INEC, our electoral umpire. 

The matter is in our courts now and everyone is waiting for what the outcome will be. But with the result of the election still being contested at the Presidential Elections Tribunal, he went ahead to declare an end to fuel subsidy and followed it up with a free float of the naira. All of these decisions have triggered suffering and outrage in many quarters, with many people are asking government to give them a chance to breathe in an economy that has become very choking. They are proposing different measures to ameliorate the situation; but each measure appears to be more challenging for the people. 

Going by his Lagos State trajectory, we are tempted to agree with some analysts who see things changing for the better in  the long run for the country. But the question is: at what cost? Tinubu will succeed in raising money for the the federal purse in the manner that he did in Lagos, but will it be at a cost that will destroy the people? The manner his success in Lagos was in the classical neo-capitalist mould of Gregor Mendel’s natural selection, where the weak are unable to cope and die off, while the strong remains and grow stronger. If small and medium businesses cannot survive, how will the poor manage to get jobs? While rolling out these harsh policies in the guise of raising money, how will the poor survive? 

What will happen to small and medium scale businesses in the light of power and transport challenges? Why is it difficult to fix our over-bloated bureaucracy? Why don’t we concentrate on these little leaky holes that have become drains to our economy? Why will our refineries not work? Talking about our refineries, I had a discussion with a well-informed professional and turnaround-cum-maintenance business expert recently. He informed me of the poor conditions of our various refineries and how we have collectively allowed them to decay. 

The problem is we, the people. Those that we have put there to run the system, those that have been handed supervisory roles down the rung of the ladder and the numerous staff of the NNPC who are there witnessing and supervising the rot and are still getting paid for sabotage to the country’s economy. He told me of how he and his team were led to a project site and how on getting there everything was in disarray because of the lack of basic maintenance culture. The path to the site was neglected, the whole place strewn with wires. He wondered how any plant could be powered under such untidy circumstances. 

It is important for the Federal Government to commission an engineering audit team to do a forensic audit of all abandoned projects. Most times we are the cause of the problems which subject the masses to needless sufferings. There are some materials for the needed turnaround maintenance still wasting away at our ports due to one controversy or the other, like payment of import duties. Things that could be handled easily through inter-ministerial or departmental cooperation are now left to constitute clogs in the wheel of progress. While all of these are going on, the vultures are standing by to profit from the whole mess. The same thing happened to our power projects under the government of President Olusegun Obasanjo; goods were seized at the port and government could not take any action. 

* Ikhioya is a commentator on public issues