Nigeria is not an easy place to govern and that is a statement of fact that can be taken to the bank. If our country was so easy to run, maybe we would have arrived El Dorado all these while, with every citizen living the life of an Arabian prince/princess, wasteful as the description might imply. Reaching El Dorado has been most difficult because of how we are wired; here, everybody is ‘very wise’ and believes he can do it better than whoever is currently holding the reins at every point in time. The situation is worsened by the various primordial sentiments driving most citizens’ reasoning and actions; religious and ethnic mostly.
So running Nigeria requires more than a vision and the physical energy to match visceral sentiments that have held us back as a people, you must be something close to an oracle, who knows what to apply for every ‘malady’ that threatens to throw spanners into the wheel each time you make the move forward, upwards, whichever one fits. At the moment, this is the circumstance President Bola Tinubu is having to deal with; a man with a well planned and thought out solution to our age-long development crises, equipped with some of the most sophisticated solutions, some of which other oracles will agree to be the ‘Panacea’.
However, like Yoruba people will say, “o ba ni, ko’i tii ba’je”, meaning, in transliteration, “it has only gotten to ‘ba’, not at ‘bad’ yet”, President Tinubu, who, earlier in his Presidency, earned the epithet ‘Idan Gan-gan’ (the real Magic) from the Gen-Z, always has one more trick up his sleeve, has continued to reinvent his methods of addressing our challenges as a nation. Hence, on Sunday, while no one, even the media, was looking the way of Aso Rock Villa, assembled a meeting of the critical stakeholders of the nation’s economy, including federal ministers, representatives of the sub-nationals and the runners of the business community, those you will consider the biggest names in corporate Nigeria, to an emergency strategy meeting in his office.
The First thing that came out of the meeting, which was later confirmed by one the business moguls he trusted enough to be part of the meeting, the Chairman of the Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, was that the select team was constituted into a Tripartite Economic Advisory Council. The committee is tripartite because it consists of the government at the federal and sub-national levels, as well as the business community.
Among those at the meeting were Vice President Kashim Shettima; Governors of Ogun, Dapo Abiodun; Anambra, Professor Charles Soludo; Chief of Staff to the President, Femi Gbajabiamila; Ministets of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun; Budget and National Planning, Atiku Bagudu; Agriculture and Food Security, Abubakar Kyari;Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris; and the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Yemi Cardoso.
Some of the private sector players at the meeting included the Chairman of the Dangote Group, Aliko Dangote; Chairman of BUA Group, Abdul Samad Rabiu; Chairman of Heirs Holdings, Tony Elumelu; Group Chief Executive Officer of Pandora Plc, Wale Tinubu; Managing Director of Matrix Group, Abdullabir Aliu; Chief Executive Officer of Financial Derivative Company, Bismarck Rewane; Director-General, Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), Segun Ajayi-Kadir, among others.
Looking at the array of people assembled and his message to them, one will immediately be drawn to start an analysis of how our President reasons. This is a man who, right from the onset of his administration, started with policies that his predecessors had only mouthed, but never found the courage to execute and has all along confidently told the world that he came to reorder the narrative about the largest black nation. Then he found himself and his programmes and plans defiantly being challenged by contrary forces, those who have always survived by the wrongness of our situation.
Then he initiated his alternative plan; bring in those holding the biggest stakes in the project Nigeria, pick their ideas and get them to commit to the success of the progressive policies he has initiated, all for the ordinary Nigerian. Just before the iron cooled off from his alternative ingenious idea, complemented with other underground moves, including intelligence/security engineering, results started showing. For instance, from Monday morning, efforts at ridding the foreign exchange market of the manipulated negatives for the Naira started yielding results as the dollar, which had been adversely rising like the yeasted dough, took a nasty tumble (it has continued to roll down the cliff since then).
Taking an educated guess, just after the meeting of the Tripartite Economic Advisory Council, Wale Jana, a Nigerian businessman, on his verified Instagram page, said “he henchmen have been called in. Dollar is going down and the economy is about to take a boost Sometimes, all it takes is to acknowledge the powers that be! There is a power that the President does not have that Elumelu, Dangote and Abdulsamad Rabiu have. As long as we look at this country through the eyes of entrepreneurship and capitalism, we will see progress”.
While speaking to the council during the meeting, the President did not waste time, he went straight to the core, the reason for assembling those whose actions will always impact the nation’s economy and ultimately the lives of Nigerians. They were called together to make them see reason why they all must work together to see to it that Nigerians are not hurt by doing everything, as individual entities and as a collective of those who hold the economy, to see that the pro-people policies and programmes of the administration work and deliver results.
“Let’s look at what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong to bring life back to the economy. Like I said, many times, the people of this country are only the people who we have to please and we are very much concerned from students to mothers and fathers, farmers, the traders and realising that everyone of us will have to fetch water from the same well. We’re looking for additional efforts that might help the downtrodden Nigerians and we will provide that hope and reassurance that economic recovery is on its way. We are not saying that we have all the answers, but we will not be blamed for not trying. We assure Nigerians that we will do our best to get our marshall plan in place and fashion out the best economic future for this country”, he said.
It would not have been a complete job if he had initiated his alternative approach, constituting the Council, and did not think to treat the mess of those who will not do and still will not allow those who want to do, do their thing. Of course, he has been deploying security and intelligence agencies in the fight against the subversive elements, whose activities have negatively impacted plans and activities of government, but then there are those who have been using legitimate platforms to undermine the administration’s efforts at achieving progress. He needed to let them know he knows how they have been using the legitimate platforms they were trusted with to subtly pursue selfish political agenda.
So when the opportunity presented itself on Thursday in Lagos, where he inaugurated the first phase of the Lagos Rail Mass Transit (LRMT) Red Line project, Baba threw a jab at a section of the organized Labour, which has used its platform to further attack the economy, deploying unconscionable number of strikes and protests. “Some Labour unions should understand that no matter how we cling to our freedom and rights, to call four strikes within the first nine months of a new administration is unacceptable. If you want to directly participate in the electoral process, wait until 2027, if not, maintain the peace. Labour is not the only voice of Nigerians”, he said.
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Achieving these steps did not stop him from engaging in other activities that were equally targeted at solving our several challenges. For instance, the Federal Executive Council (FEC) met on Monday. If nothing else, the meeting achieved a decision that has brought praises to the administration; the implementation of parts of the Orosanye Report. Even Mr Peter Obi, whose position and opinion of the Tinubu administration is well known, gave a pass mark to government on this, saying it was “a welcome development”. Other decisions were taken, including the one having to do with Social Security Unemployment Programme, which will cater to the welfare of unemployed Nigerian youths.
There was the launch of the Expatriate Employment Levy, which sees to it that foreigners do not come into Nigeria to take citizens jobs as well as ensuring the bridging of wage gap between Nigerians and expatriates, among others, on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he was in Ondo State, paying condolence visit on the state government and the family of the former governor, the late Arakunrin Rotimi Akeredolu. He also used the time to meet with Pa Reuben Fasoranti and other Yoruba leaders. He seized the moment to reassure Nigerians of his resolve to achieve true and fiscal federalism for the nation. He left Ondo State for Lagos, where he would be performing the inauguration of the LRMT.
On Thursday, after the LRMT inauguration, he departed for Qatar, on the invitation of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. That’s a State Visit that is expected to yield so much for Nigeria, in terms of commerce, security and general economic growth. However, even while out there, he already lined out a number of new appointments, which were made public on Friday by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Chief Ajuri Ngelale; five for the FGN Power Company Limited and four for the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN).
As the new week starts, more is expected to happen with regards to the alternative strategy he initiated last week, so expect yet another exciting week.