Tinubu’s First-Year Assessment: Mark: 37%; Grade: Fail!

 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