Category: Saturday

One of the most insightful assessments of the last two years of the President Bola Tinubu administration was undertaken, perhaps understandably, by the Chairman of the BUA Group, a leading investor in diverse productive sectors of the Nigerian economy, Alhaji Abdul Samad Rabiu. As a practical business operative at home with the realities of running functioning companies in Nigeria that engage in production, he was able to demonstrate with concrete examples the positive impact of the administration’s key reform policies including removal of fuel subsidy, merger of the parallel exchange rate markets and the consequent devaluation of the Naira, massive investment in infrastructure and temporary waiver of tariffs on agricultural imports among others on economic growth and development. Alhaji Rabiu ‘s hands -on understanding of the economy reminds one of the late Alfred Chief Alfred Rewane, another astute businessman, in his very public disagreements with the late Professor Ojetunji Aboyade, the brilliant but essentially theoretical economist, who was one of the academic pillars of military President, General Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP).

Unlike Mr Peter Obi, for instance, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 elections who is a substantial player in the Nigerian economy but only as a trader,  importer and financial speculator with tangential involvement in production, Rabiu appreciates the critical significance of the Tinubu administration’s policies in expanding and strengthening the productive capacities of the economy. According to Alhaji Rabiu, “In infrastructure, the difference is also clear. Look at the Lagos-Calabar highway. Look at the Sokoto-Badagry road. Look at the Kwara projects we are executing under the tax credit scheme. Look at Kano-Kongolam. Look at the Okpella to Kogi State corridor. These projects are progressing because of the savings from subsidy removal and FX unification. With more revenue, Nigeria is building”.

Continuing, Rabiu states that “These roads and others being built are critical because logistics have become a major challenge. Transporting goods from Lagos to the North is very expensive due to bad roads. Now, the President is addressing this. With better infrastructure, logistics will improve, and businesses will grow. These reforms have enabled long-term planning and serious investment”. When he gives concrete examples of how the reforms have enhanced the investment capacity and activities of the BUA Group in the Nigerian economy, you readily understand why Rabiu, just like Alhaji Aliko Dangote, another development -oriented capitalist, cannot indulge in the unproductive fantasizing of a Peter Obi who loves to travel the world to spread his delusional gospel of a non-performing Tinubu administration armed with manufactured statistics of dubious provenance.

In the words of Rabiu, “Since President Tinubu took office, BUA Group has invested over one billion dollars in the Nigerian economy. We are expanding our food business, doubling our flour and pasta facilities in Port Harcourt and building another one in Lagos. Demand is increasing. People are earning more. Confidence is returning. We have also completed the first POP plaster manufacturing plant in Nigeria which is now operating and are soon starting construction of a 300 MW solar energy project in Sokoto State. In the oil and gas sector, we are completing our LNG project in Ajaokuta, Kogi State. These investments are possible because of stability that has been brought about by President Tinubu’s reforms. We can plan now. The exchange rate has been fairly stable for almost a year. FX is accessible. Money is coming in from different sources, and investors are responding. If you want 200 million dollars a week for trade, you can get it without lobbying anyone at the Central Bank. These are the results of good policies”.

Speaking this week at the inauguration of the access road to the Lekki Deep Sea Port in Lagos, Alhaji Dangote expressed similar sentiments. According to him, “Your leadership has been both decisive and reassuring. Your actions have reignited hope for a prosperous Nigeria of today and of the future. From the very start of your administration, Your Excellency has worked tirelessly to foster an enabling environment for private sector -led growth”. It is perhaps people like Rabiu and Dangote that Alhaji Abubakar Atiku was referring to when he said the Tinubu administration’s policies were benefitting the rich who are being made richer. It is not known when the Waziri Adamawa became a fire -belching revolutionary. But at least the two businessmen are contributing phenomenally to the growth of the Nigerian economy and generating mass employment through aggressive and unceasing investment in diverse sectors. Most of those of his friends to which several of Nigeria’s public enterprises valued at billions of Naira were auctioned for peanuts when Atiku statutorily supervised the privatization programme were criminally enriched without adding value to the national economy.

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Dangote and Rabiu are not the only inspiring examples that suggest that the sustenance and consumation of the ongoing economic reform policies of the Tinubu administration may offer the last chance for the creation of the conditions to enable the Nigerian borgeosie become catalysts for national development. Any failure this time around may make ever more imperative  far more radical and hardly peaceful or democratic options to force the country to break out of what is becoming to be perceived as an irresolvable developmental dead-end. This is why it is heartwarming that at least 22 manufacturing companies have so far benefitted from the disbursement of N16.1 billion loans of the N75 billion provided for under the Presidential Conditional Grant Scheme to strengthen their productive bases and expand their distribution lines at nine per cent interest rate annually. But it is now 14 months after the policy was first announced in December 2023 and it’s slow pace of implementation has been attributed to government bureaucratic delays.

The Bank of Industry (BOI), which is the vehicle for implementing the policy must surely devise strategies for companies to have accelerated access to these critical funds without compromising procedural rigour and integrity. This is particularly so as the plan as announced also includes provision of another N75 billion for 75,000 Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) to obtain loans of N1 million each to support their businesses and cushion the adverse consequences of the reforms. The earlier the affected companies obtain and begin to utilize the loans, the better for the reforms and the brighter the prospects of achieving the objectives for which the fund is being injected into the economy will be.

Radical political economists make a distinction between waves of transient economic crises in African countries and the more fundamental challenge of underdevelopment. Unfortunately, Orthodox economists tend to conflate the two. Thus, they often pursue policies that address the economic crisis in the short term, may achieve an appreciable rate of growth but still do not promote development in any concrete or meaningful manner. The radical political economist, Professor Okwudiba Nnoli, made this point in the late 1980s with regard to the SAP then being implemented and his submission remains valid. As he put it then: “The SAP is addressed to a steady and balanced growth, not to development. Therefore, it emphasizes changes in the indicators of growth, such as the gross domestic product, balance of payment, exchange rates, money supply, interest rates, privatization and liberalization of trade. It ignores the qualitative changes in society induced by changes in these parameters.”

Critical as these technical considerations are in economic policy formulation and implementation, they must be supported by the most crucial factor in achieving national development, which is the mobilization of the popular energies of the people to engage as active agents in the development process. Unfortunately, this is where liberal economics is deficient and it is in the direct engagement of the people physically, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually to participate actively in and contribute concretely to the development process that ‘Tinubunomics’ can truly realize its potentials. For instance, with regard to food availability to curtail stratospheric prices, Alhaji Rabiu noted that the temporary tariff waivers on food imports granted by the Tinubu administration for six months, “allowed rice to be brought in and milled immediately. The hoarders were cut out. Prices began to drop. It was a short-term solution, but it worked”.

But then, what happens when the tariff waivers expire after six months? Agriculture is one sector where large numbers of people can be mobilized to grow food on an expansive scale. The country has an abundance of fertile land.  In most parts, the climate is clement for productive agricultural activities. Already, considerable investment is being made made in the procurement and distribution of agricultural inputs such as seedlings, fertilizers and insecticides. Orders placed for tractors, harvesters and other mechanical appliances are being delivered. But these are not sufficient conditions to achieve munificent food production. Equally critical is the appropriate mobilization and organization of the people to engage in mass food production.

As has been advocated in this space a number of times, the organization of Nigerian farmers into viable Cooperatives has become an indispensable categorical imperative. It is hard but unavoidable work if we are to develop a thriving and vibrant agricultural sector. As Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who had thought deeply and written extensively on the issue, submitted in one of his lectures, “To this end, the oft-repeated and sound policies of the Federal and State governments towards Nigerian farmers of (1) organizing them into virile, viable and prosperous Cooperatives; (2) subsidy in kind, cash and services; (3) provision of finance and technical know-how; should now be pursued and translated into realities with unabating dispatch and vigour”.

Even the requisite security without which displaced farming communities cannot fully return to active work on their farms in a safe and conducive environment can only be achieved with the active involvement of the people. The people, organized to secure their communities but armed to a level not below that of those who ceaselessly attack and seek to seize their land, must be the basis of an effective community policing system under federal or state control. The proposed ‘Forest Rangers’ recently approved by the President must thus be essentially people and community-based. The President should urgently give a deadline for its recruitment, training, equipping and take-off as the restoration and sustenance of security across rural and urban communities across the country is critical to the ultimate success of ‘Tinubunomics’.

It is difficult to comprehend why the Financial Times titled its otherwise brilliant and nuanced editorial on two years of the President Bola Tinubu administration, published on May 29, as ‘Nigeria’s shock therapy’. The editorial did not disguise the newspaper’s fascination with the free market, neoliberal economic policies aggressively marketed and at times imposed especially on financially beleaguered, heavily indebted and chronically dependent third world countries by major international financial institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). But President Tinubu is no reflexive, unthinking afficiando of free market extremism. His support for neoliberal capitalist policies, an inclination noticeable even from the mid-eighties during the implementation of military President, General Ibrahim Babangida’s introduction of the Structural Adjustment Programme, (SAP), was not rigidly ideological. Rather, it was strategically pragmatic and understandably informed by his studying in the United States, his training as an accountant, his working in the public sector in America and rising to become Treasurer of Mobil Nigeria before his fateful foray into politics.

Unlike those opposition political leaders who claim to be blind and deaf to any achievements of the Tinubu administration and insist that the administration has zero performance levels, thereby exhibiting their intellectual dishonesty and lack of moral integrity, the Financial Times in its editorial demonstrates a commendable grasp of pertinent issues in Nigeria’s political economy.  According to the newspaper’s Editorial Board, “On day one Tinubu removed a ruinously expensive fuel subsidy. More important still, the Central Bank has restored monetary policy orthodoxy after a shambolic era in which only cronies with access to cheap dollars benefitted. After a dangerous overshot, the Naira has stabilized, with the gap between the official and black market shrinking to almost nothing. The Central Bank has stopped printing money to pay for government profligacy. Politicians still spend too much, often on fripperies like an extravagant presidential Jet, but at least the government has begun to increase tax receipts”.

According to the newspaper”Halfway through the first presidential term of Bola Tinubu, who completes two years in office this Thursday, Nigeria is in better shape than at any time in the past decade. That may come as a surprise -or even sound like a sick joke – to tens of millions of Nigerians who af living crisis in a generation. That may come as a surprise – or even sound like a sick joke- to tens of millions of Nigerians who are suffering the worst cost of living crisis in a generation. Yet, a former governor of Lagos and the country’s wiliest politician in a generation, has stabilized the economy and laid the groundwork for a broader recovery”.

To build on this performance, the newspaper advised that the administration should tackle inflation with more urgency, build on tax reform by achieving its stated aim of doubling the ratio of tax collected to 18 per cent of GDP, spend envisaged higher tax revenue on neglected schools and clinics and confront Banditry and terrorism with the single-mindedness as it did monetary policy because “The army needs cleaning up as urgently as did the Central Bank”

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The Waziri Adamawa stridently condemns what he describes as the reckless borrowing spree of the Tinubu administration while conveniently ignoring the explanation by the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Mr Wale Edun, that “There is no such thing as a $25 billion borrowing plan over six months or even over one year, what was laid before the National Assembly in line with the law and the Medium Term Expenditure Framework is project-linked borrowing to be disbursed over five to seven years”. Again, a case of unfortunate intellectual dishonesty.

Alhaji Atiku accuses the Tinubu administration of implementing policies that only enrich a few and impoverish the majority of Nigerians. But the Waziri is least placed morally to raise such questions. He forgets how his former boss, General Olusegun Obasanjo, took him to the cleaners most vehemently and viciousl in his book, ‘My Watch’, for his alleged fraudulent role in the auction of some of Nigeria’s most prized public assets to his friends at give away prices far below their market values. When asked on national television to clarify the issue, Atiku  cynically wondered whether he should have sold the assets to his enemies! The fraudulent privatization programme undertaken by the PDP during its 16 years in power was a key factor in Nigeria’s protracted economic crisis. Was it not under the PDP administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan that the then Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) was unbundled into Distribution and Generating Companies and handed over to private operators who as it turned out had neither the financial capability nor the professional expertise to effectively discharge the responsibility thrust on them. That remains a key causal factor today in the conundrum that continues to plague Nigeria’s power sector.

Most of the criticisms of the Tinubu administrasation’s two years in office have focused on the hardships engendered by the President’s harsh but inevitable economic reforms. But this is a cheap play on the emotions of Nigerians. The question is would the economy not have headed for a greater disaster, possibly terminal collapse, but for the clinical surgery that had to be performed on the patient through the reforms? For instance, the respected and cerebral Emeritus Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, Cardinal John Onaiyekan,  at the 2025 Catholic Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria (CSN) Communications Week Public Lecture, called on President Tinubu to urgently address the severe economic hardship as well as the deteriorating security situation in the country which is obviously not an illegitimate demand.

According to the cleric, “I do not think we are unfair to government if we say that in the last two years, our level of living has crashed considerably. The government is there to make sure that the level of well-being of Nigerians is maintained and if possible, improved. If he continues like this for the rest of his term, if we have a free and fair election, he will not win. Because how can the country bring him back, if we are not feeling good?”. Unfortunately, the problem with this type of criticism is that it assumes that the problem with the Nigerian economy was created in the last two years of the Tinubu administration. But the structural distortions at the root of Nigeria’s protracted economic crisis long predated the current administration.

The problem with the import-substitution industrialization mode adopted during the colonial era and sustained by successive post-colonial governments, according to Professor Bayo Olukoshi, is that as it developed, “it became clear that its sustainability depended on the ability of the state to earn sufficient foreign exchange to met its needs, namely, raw materials, spare parts and machinery”. For as long as the state was awash with abundant foreign exchange earnings largely from munificent oil sales, there was no problem. This was why General Gowon as Head of State boasted in the early 1970s that Nigeria’s problem was not money but how to spend it. By the late seventies to early eighties, the bubble burst. Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings plummeted substantially and the manufacturing sector suffered a severe decline at a time when agricultural productivity and earnings had plunged abysmally. The military administration of General Obasanjo, the civilian administration of Alhaji Shehu Shagari and the military regime of General Muhammadu Buhari were all forced to adopt different variants of austerity measures that left the fundamentally distorted structure of the economy unaddressed.

By 1984, Nigeria’s economic and development planning had reached a veritable dead-end. Refusing to accept the IMF and World Bank conditionalities such as removal of fuel and other subsidies as well as the devaluation of the Naira, the Buhari-Tunde Idiagbon regime became isolated from the international monetary system while its policies such as drastically stepping up the amount of national resources expended on servicing debt to win the confidence of international creditors or the adoption of counter-trade to barter Nigeria’s crude oil for critical raw materials were largely ineffectual. In August 1985, Babangida stepped in as military President and radically changed the direction of Nigeria’s economic developmental trajectory by reaching an accommodation with the International Financial Institutions and implementing the Structural Adjustment Programme which met all of the IMF/World Bank conditionalities although it did not obtain the IMF loan due to fierce public opposition.

Babangida fundamentally deregulated the economy especially prices and interest rates,  devalued the Naira, removed import controls, substantially reduced fuel subsidies, embarked on an elaborate privatization and commercialization programme of public enterprises among other essentially market-driven policies. But ultimately the outcome of these policies was to lead to massive de-industrialization of the economy with many formerly flourishing manufacturing companies shutting down, worsening unemployment, deteriorating infrastructure and services in health and education, escalating inflationary spirals and deepening poverty levels. Despite this, all governments after Babangida with the exception of the General Sani Abacha junta, adopted varying degrees and components of SAP. Perhaps Nigeria has no choice. In terms of policy articulation, enunciation and implementation, we are really not much different from a one-party state.

It is in the interest of the political class, in spite of partisan differences, for the Tinubu administrasation’s Renewed Hope Agenda to succeed. This may be the last opportunity for the bourgeois class to demonstrate its capacity to lead Nigeria effectively and capably and avert the instigation of revolutionary pressures that may move Nigeria in a radically different direction. Luckily, the administrasation’s reform agenda is beginning to yield fruit. There has been a substantial increase in foreign reserves, inflationary spirals are gradually coming down as agricultural productivity picks up, our debt obligations are being steadily offset boosting confidence in the management of the economy, sub-national units of government earn markedly increased revenue accruals enhancing their capacity to deliver democracy dividends and ameliorate poverty, there have been impressive trade surpluses over the last three quarters, foreign direct investment is steadily growing while significant number of Nigerians are being positively impacted by such programmes as the Student Loans Scheme and the Presidential Loan and Grant Scheme to name just a few successes of the administration.

But the administration cannot afford to rest on its oars. The President cannot allow any of his functionaries to lapse into complacency arising from self-satisfaction. As Professor Okwudiba Nnoli noted of the Babangida regime, its SAP actually met the targets it set for itself between 1986 and 1989. But in spite of this, this momentum was not sustained. IBB’s SAP ultimately failed. How can President Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda’s successes be sustained and have an enduring and sustainable impact on the Nigerian economy?

The Financial Times gives an important advice: “As Nigeria’s election cycle edges towards 2027, Tinubu May be tempted to slow the pace of change. That would be a mistake. He should forge ahead, with the overriding aim of making ordinary Nigerians – not just investors – feel the benefits of shock therapy”. But ‘Shock Therapy’ again? This was a phrase coined by the Canadian radical and progressive writer, Naomi Klein, in her best selling book, ‘The Shock Doctrine’. It is a term she uses to describe what she calls ‘disaster capitalism’. It is built on the economic philosophy of the late influential economist of the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman, who believed that natural disasters or even deliberately instigated occurrences such as wars provide great opportunities for private interests and corporations to take over public assets and turn them into profitable ventures in a way that governments can never do. That certainly is not the spirit of Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda.