By Olu Fasan
Dear readers, I am wearing my academic cap this week, and assessing the first-year performance of Bola Tinubu, Nigeria’s president since May 29 last year. In fact, I have marked Tinubu’s first-year assessment. The result? He failed badly. He scored an abysmal 37 per cent!
*Tinubu
Earlier this week, Tinubu marked his own exam paper and awarded himself a pass mark. He said he met Nigeria bleeding and stopped the bleeding. That’s utterly ludicrous, given that most Nigerians have been trapped in unimaginable misery and anguish over the past one year, and the fundamentals of Nigeria’s economy and social fabric have crumbled further in the past year. Yet, Tinubu has cheerleaders. One of them is Dr Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, who said Tinubu “has laid the groundwork for progress” in his first year. What an outlandish thing to say! Well, for me, Tinubu failed his first-year assessment.
Talking about assessment, let me, in fidelity with
the Aristotelian mode of persuasion, appeal to ethos, to credibility. Until
recently, I was a tutor at the London School of Economics, LSE, where I am
still a visiting fellow. Over the years, I have marked many essays, exams and
dissertations, against established marking criteria. To secure a Distinction or
top Merit, a student must show sophistication in the following areas: their
answers must be relevant to the questions; organised and structured; show
clarity of exposition; have analytical depth; and demonstrate the use of
evidence.
Now, don’t think these criteria are only relevant to
students’ assessments; no, they are also applicable to performance in
government, especially to policy development and delivery. Tinubu failed in
each of them.
Trust me, dear readers, the 37
per cent I have awarded Tinubu has nothing to do with the 37 per cent he
secured in last year’s presidential election. That said, there is a shared
resonance of failure between them. I mean, anyone who secured 37 per cent in an
election, rejected by 63 per cent of voters, can hardly claim any success. But
under Nigeria’s military constitution, someone with such a weak mandate and
legitimacy can form a winner-takes-all government. Thus, despite his 37 per
cent “mandate”, Tinubu has absolute power and runs Nigeria like his personal
fiefdom. The election result, now history, is not my concern here. Except that,
coincidentally, Tinubu also gets 37 per cent in his first-year assessment. But
how?
Well, first, Tinubu’s government lacks an organising principle, lacks a vision; everything is based on a scattergun approach. The first evidence of the absence of a vision is the formation of his cabinet. No president who wants to succeed, knowing the challenges that Nigeria faces, would form the kind of cabinet Tinubu formed. It was a cabinet designed to reward cronies, return political favours and shore up support for his re-election bid in 2027.
Why, for instance, did Tinubu put
virtually all the economic ministries under his Lagos “boys” and other cronies
from the South-West, his geo-political zone? And why are there so many
deadwood ministers, whose only qualifications were that, as governors, they
helped Tinubu “ win” their states? Why did he choose to form a government of
cronies, sycophants and political jobbers? Truth be told, Tinubu’s current
cabinet is too weak, too ineffectual, to tackle Nigeria’s acute challenges; the
time calls for a government of all the talents.
Another evidence of Tinubu’s
unpreparedness is that none of the policies he introduced since he came to
office involved serious analysis and planning. There is what political
economists call stroke-of-a-pen decisions. These are decisions anyone can make
quickly and easily. But there are decisions, with far-reaching consequences,
that no president should make simply at the stroke of a pen. Yet, when Tinubu
declared that “subsidy is gone” and when he floated the naira, no analysis and
planning went into those decisions. No thoughts went into their implementation
to avoid unintended consequences. Absolutely none. Tinubu said he was
“possessed by courage” in abruptly scrapping the fuel subsidy. But good
policies are not made with such impulsiveness, such rashness.
Dr Agbakoba listed removal of
the fuel subsidy, flotation of the naira and “ rehabilitating refineries and
incentivising new private refineries” as Tinubu’s “notable achievements” that
laid the “groundwork for progress”. The learned senior lawyer was hasty in his
judgement. Each of the “achievements” is already unravelling. Take the fuel
subsidy. Even the IMF which called for its removal also called for “adequate
compensatory measures for the poor and efficient and transparent use of the
saved money.” None of these has happened. There is no transparency on the use
of the saved money, and the savings have not been used to alleviate the pains
of poor Nigerians.
Furthermore, the IMF believes
the government has quietly introduced “an implicit subsidy.” Truth is, until
Nigeria can produce refined petroleum, enough to meet local demands, fuel
subsidy won’t go away completely. Yet, despite the promises to turn around the
Port Harcourt Refinery, it is still not working, and the other three state-
owned refineries remain moribund. Recently, Aliko Dangote said the government
won’t need to import refined petroleum from next month, suggesting his refinery
would produce enough to meet local demands. Would that happen? Even if it did,
would Dangote’s consumable fuels bring down the pump price of petrol? The jury
is still out!
What about the floating of the
naira? Well, the government is fretting about the naira’s devaluation. And it
is intervening aggressively to make the naira appreciate. But the value of a
currency is determined by the strength of the economy. If the economy is weak,
the currency will be weak, and vice versa. Yet, the fundamentals of Nigeria’s
economy are extremely weak, with inflation at 33 per cent and interest rates at
24.75 per cent. In a recent report titled “Nigeria’s currency crisis the last
straw for many overseas groups,” the Financial Times said naira’s devaluation
and foreign exchange scarcity have forced many foreign companies to divest from
Nigeria, while many local businesses “have died quietly.” So, where are
Tinubu’s “notable achievements” that lay the “groundwork for progress”?
There are other policies, such as students’ loans,
plans to establish state police and the so-called Lagos-Calabar coastal
highway, that space doesn’t allow me to discuss. But they all fail the good
policymaking test and will have perverse consequences.
So, forget the praise singers, Tinubu’s first year
in office is a failure. It inflicted untold pains on ordinary Nigerians and
caused huge damage to Nigeria’s economy and social fabric. All for some
pie-in-the-sky future “gains”!
*Dr. Fasan is a commentator on public issues
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