It’s the economy, stupid.” This short, razor-sharp sentence was one of the three strategic soundbites coined by James Carville for campaign workers to deploy to win support for the then Democratic Party US presidential candidate Bill Clinton.
There’s perhaps no better time than now to import this simple, almost meaningless, but very powerful phrase into Nigeria’s electoral lexicon (just as “Emi Lokan” has now been). Not only in light of the country’s perplexing, multifaceted economic travails from which other socioeconomic problems and lethal societal vices have issued, but also because of the alarm that was sounded by the World Bank very recently that Nigeria is in dire straits as a result of her “dwindling revenue.” The international financial institution actually characterised this “dwindling revenue” as an “existential threat.”
While one may never know for sure why the World Bank rang the alarm bell on the country’s economic health at this particular time when voters are warming up to elect a new president, the alarm, nonetheless, came at such an auspicious moment. We may well thank the financial institution for, at the very least, trying to point our attention to what’s really important, what we should be concerned about in an election season; rather than, quite frankly, the present nonsensical issues that have so far occupied a centre stage in our political discourse if we want to survive, and not implode as a nation. And this is where the presidential candidates come in.
Unless the unthinkable happens, either by some judicial sleight of hand through disqualification or the Grim Reaper itself decides to strike (but God forbid), Nigerian voters must decide who will be their next president on Saturday, February 25, 2023 between three contenders in the persons of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Peter Gregory Obi. And this is where Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu comes in.
So much has been said, and more would still be articulated when the real campaign starts about the suitability and experiential qualifications of these three main presidential candidates by themselves and their supporters.
It may be said that a people genuinely desirous of a saviour shouldn’t look anywhere else other than in the direction of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate. This is by virtue of his unassailable track records of social and economic engineering, not to mention his scientific approach to governance, laced with his knack for looking for the best brains society can offer.
Without necessarily going through the litany of his accomplishments, which has been adequately articulated by others since he won his party’s presidential primary, one can easily see that the solutions that have been suggested by the international financial institution if Nigeria must get out of her economic woes, most of which are self-inflicted, had already been discovered, tested and found to have worked like magic by the “Lagos Boy” when he ruled the roost in that state of Aquatic Splendour.
While some of this magic has since been adopted by the same federal government he now wants to superintend, countries in the West African subregion have since incorporated the financial template he developed for Lagos, which is still being used by subsequent governors to this day, into their development model.
At a “virtual event anchored by the PwC’s Fiscal Policy Partner,” the World Bank, in its report on Nigeria’s dire economic straits, suggested that “the continued payment of trillions of naira on fuel subsidy by the government” will continue to be “an existential threat” to the polity.
One can say at this juncture, without any fear of contradiction, that a parallel can be established between what the World Bank has suggested, which is that the country must find a way to increase her “dwindling revenue” and what Tinubu did as the governor of Lagos State. It should be recalled that when the state’s monthly allocations were suddenly seized by the federal government because of his audacity to create Local Council Development Areas (LCDAs) from the then existing 20 Local Government Areas (LGAs), Tinubu led his administration into an overdrive.
While Lagosians panicked, chastised him and complained that the heavens were going to fall on them because of the seizure, Tinubu said to them, through his actions, not to worry. He ended up generating revenues that nobody ever imagined in the state, let alone across the country.
The international financial institution, also in its attempt to guide the nation and her minders right, said that “if the country failed to optimise its tax system and focus on other areas to boost its revenue, the already low revenue would continue to drop.”
Also, based on facts that are immutable, Asiwaju is another politician who had been at the helm of affairs in the history of this country, second to Chief Obafemi Awolowo, that built a formidable, robust, technology-driven tax regime that other state governors including those ones with significant industrial bases, till today, are still scratching their heads as to how it can be replicated in their states.
And as if the World Bank’s dire warning was not enough to be dejected about, the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed said that “the nation was battling with revenue problems, which had compelled the government to keep borrowing.” She also warned that “the debt stock had risen to N41.6tn in the first quarter of 2022 with projections that it could peak at N45tn by the end of the year,” adding that “Nigeria is now rated the “fifth on the list of the World Bank’s debtors, with $11.7bn debt stock as of June 30, 2021.”
What’s more, one of the participants at the event, Mr. Awasthi, who shared a slide in his presentation, explained that “Between 2015 and 2019, Nigeria’s non-oil revenues were among the lowest in the world and as a result the second lowest in spending, and that oil revenues were also falling even when oil prices were higher.” He also went further to tell us what we already know that “Nigeria has the largest economy in Africa and the largest country in Africa by population” and she’s therefore “critical to Africa’s progress.” “But the government of Nigeria, from the public finance perspective, is really facing an existential threat. Let’s not downplay the situation. That is the actual reality,” Awasthi warned.
It should now be seen, from the foregoing, that what should be front and centre of our political discourse is not only the seemingly hopeless and precarious national economic condition but who’s in a good stead among the aforementioned presidential trio that can, through his track records and his audacity to dare, which are the two most important leadership qualities that people in other countries of the world on the growth path constantly and consistently demand from those that must shepherd them, give Nigeria and her people a new lease of life.
Considering the presidential candidates that are in contention for the highest political office in the land with Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who should not only win but must be seen to have won by the Nigerian voters should be a foregone conclusion by now. Tinubu’s emergence should have put paid to all the leadership questions that have dogged us as a nation for a very long time. He should have been the end of discussion by now because, at the end of it all, it is about the economy, stupid.
- Odere is a former Senior Special Assistant (Diaspora Affairs) to Ekiti State Governor.