The presidential candidate of the Alliance for Peoples Trust (APT), Gbenga Olwawepo-Hashim, spoke with reporters in Abuja on how he will reposition the economy and fight corruption, if elected as president in next year’s election.
How will you fight against corruption?
I’ve told you that we have to deal with corruption from a point of view of an integrated policy for it to be effective, by removing the root cause of corruption. One of the reasons why people were bribing NITEL official was that you had 400,000 lines to 80 million people. But once you allowed competition in that place and now you have over a hundred million lines and the lines are now even almost for free. It is the network producers that are trying to induce you with all kinds of packages so that you can buy their own. We eliminated corruption in the telecom sector through competition and policy. Nigeria’s corruption which takes place mostly in the public agencies is as a result of over centralisation. Wherever you have a long queue, people will do anything to jump the queue. Once you have a system where only man can sign a piece of paper, he becomes like an emperor. Everybody is lobbying him with money, with language, with sentiment , with religion. But once he is not the only emperor in town who can do the same business, your reduce all those corruptive tendencies around him. So, it is not just only through punishment.
President Muhammadu Buhari recently said that the economy is looking good and he will make it better. That seems to have taken sail out of a number of candidates like you who have been hammering on the poor state of the economy. Don’t you think so?
Anybody who read O.A Lawal or Teriba on O/Level Economics will know that the economic management under the APC government is a disaster. Even if you didn’t go to school, you can relate to some credible data immediately. The Brooklyns Institute just indicated that just within the past four months alone, over a million Nigerians joined the category of those who are acutely poor. That is to say they have fallen below that bracket of those who live on two dollars a day and there are 88 million Nigerians in that category right now. This has never happened before.
Secondly, it is a big tragedy that under a regime of high oil price as we have now because the excuses before was that oil price was low; we have a very high oil price regime now and poverty is on the rise, there is a run on the reserve of the country. It looks to me like the APC as a government has made a covenant with poverty and they are irredeemably committed to impoverishing Nigerians. The truth of it is that the President does not understand basic economics. Otherwise, he would not say that the economy is looking good.
There is no way the economy can grow without appreciable electricity supply. What will your party do to improve the electricity?
Interestingly, that’s a sector I’ve invested in globally. The first thing we need to do for infrastructure generally is that you have to be able to sustain investment in that sector. Once investors are able to see a pathway to profitability, you don’t need to wax record for them to bring their money because what they are looking for is profit. They will invest, either it is in the generation sector, distribution or even concessioning or transmission.
Right now, there are lots of obstacles that have grown on the path of the investor and that’s why you are not seeing the needed investment in that sector. Some of these obstacles are not to do with the law because Nigeria has one of the best electricity sector reform Acts in the world. What you have is manifest incompetence in implementing the provisions of the Act. You also have a situation where some regulators even think that their job is to stop investments. That’s their perception of their job as regulators. When you appear as one who wants to invest in the sector, they want to prove to you that what you have set out to do is not doable. They don’t have an attitude of how do we ensure that this investment comes true. So, they start writing letters and quoting all the rules that will make impossible to do the investment.
From a practical point of view, these are some of the things that can be dealt with through executive actions within 90 days and once you remove those obstacles that will make an investor to stay four years before he gets license or ten years before he concludes an agreement with an off taker, when he needs only 18 months to deliver a power plant, once you boot out all those obstacles by the right appointment and you generate executive orders that can give standard operating procedures as to tenor of applications.
Most importantly too is that we have to decentralize power for Nigeria’s infrastructure to grow. For instance, we should be able to have local transmission grids that the states can have under their own jurisdictions and I tell you that just be merely amending and rearranging the distribution of power in the legislative list and we have states being able to participate in the local transmission, a state like Lagos plus Ogun State within four years will net about $100 billion investment in the power sector and they will be able to get the needed investment that will generate about 18,500 megawatts of electricity, which in my estimate is a reasonable need for the capacity that those two states have right now, based on their population.
You know that it’s scandalous that Nigeria, based on its population, needs about 160,000 megawatts of electricity and we are not just ten percent of it. South Africa which is a country of about 50 million people, has more than 50,000 megawatts of electricity. Even Heathrow Airport generates more electricity than the whole of Nigeria. That’s to tell you how terrible it is.
So, I understand the issues and one of the things I will be bringing to the table as the President is my 27 years’ experience in the private sector as an investor that has invested all over the world. I know why investors put money in one country and why they refuse to put money in another country and I can fix that in a matter of months and return Nigeria back to growth and expand the GDP of the economy.
For a long time, we have concentrated on inanities. It’s good to fight corruption, but you can better fight corruption when you decentralise. Any system where only one man can sign a piece of paper has inbuilt corruption in it because that man becomes extra-terrestrial; and because centralisation creates bureaucracy, that is where all kinds of lobbyists come in to collect bribes on behalf of public officials.
For instance, when we had only NITEL, Nigeria had only 400,000 telephone lines. They were always having tax forces in NITEL to fight corruption and sharp practices. But it never worked. In fact, those tax forces became the centre of corruption because in what legitimate manner will you allocate 400,00 lines among 80 million people at that time. It’s either the person is from your village or you have taken money from him because there is no legitimate reason to treat one application over the other. But the moment we decentralized and we have a number of carriers, it’s the operators who now lobby to find out who you are. They are looking for your economic data so that they can target you with their products. So, decentralisation, competition drives efficiency and naturally reduces corruption.
So, one of the major failures of APC is that APC was resistant to devolution and decentralisation of power and at the same time, they said they were trying to fight corruption. When you decentralize, it will lead to rapid infrastructural development. So, decentralization and devolution of power is not just simply a political discourse. It’s a fundamental requirement for rapid economic growth to reduce and completely eliminate poverty.
What is your take on restructuring?
The word restructuring has been so politicized that even the content of the discourse sometimes is lost. There are people who are generally scared when they hear that and for some, because it is the new fact that everybody wants to hear, they have to mouth it. The point for me is the content. When you are talking about decentralisation, you are talking about devolution of power. We have been talking about that for more than 30 years now. Senator Mahmoud Waziri was the Treasurer of our group then, the National Consultative Forum, led by Alao Aka-Bashorun. The group that first talked about decentralisation of power and we attempted organizing a national conference under the army and the army brought armoured tanks to stop us in National Theatre. It was a well-articulated and well thought out position. We had the people who we called the technocratic group who were people who have been Super Permanent Secretaries in the days when the military came into power for the first time. They themselves came to the conviction that an over-centralized Nigeria was unworkable and that we needed to decentralize and devolve power. Then we had those of us who came from the Human Rights Movement led by Alao Aka-Bashorun, Beko Ransom-Kuti. I was the National Administrative Secretary. A lot of people who are talking restructuring today were with that military government opposing us. Some of them were contesting under them. They said we were talking rubbish, that we should allow them to do their elections, while we were focused on the issues that were germane, which was the structure of the state. But because a lot of Nigerians don’t have a sense of history, anybody can just appear during elections and open his mouth and then he will get attention. Those who created a lot of political illiteracy in the air right now did it deliberately because they removed history from the syllabus. So, for some people, whatever they just read in the internet within two weeks, because they don’t even have memory to remember what happened five years ago, not to talk of what happened 30 years ago.
This also encourages a lot of political fraud. Sometimes, we transport ourselves to be defrauded politically. I would have expected a good research on this issue. One of the things you see in academics first is that you pay tribute to the originator of a given idea. There is lot of intellectual fraud in this country. People are talking about restructuring. There is even no tribute to Alao Aka-Bashorun who died fighting for this. There I no remembrance of Mahmoud Waziri. There is no mention of Anthony Enahoro. Some people just get up and open their mouth and they want to look they are the originator of such idea . The media has the responsibility to do more than just reporting fraud. They need to dig deep and refocus public discuss.
So, I don’t want to deal with the noise. I want to deal with the content. The content is that we need to devolve power. Over centralisation is unworkable. It leads to corruption and inefficiency. To be quite honest, when mwmade the campaign on that note, it was not ethnic. That’s why we had Mahmoud Waziri as our treasurer. Alhaji Tanko Yakassai was part of us. They didn’t see any qualms with what we were talking about. But when you regionalize it and you begin to evoke ethno religious sentiment around that issue, you cannot have a consensus around such an issue.
So, punishment alone does not deter corruption. As a matter of fact, when a practice becomes something that almost everybody is engaged in, then you have a huge social problem. It’s no longer something that you can deal with police action. It’s something that you have to deal with policy, attacking it at its root.
You also have the other level of corruption where people are programmed through extreme and acute poverty to cope and survive. If you give a policeman about N20,000 and you give him a gun, can anybody survive on N20,000 in Nigeria? He leaves work, sometimes he gets shot, he has no insurance and all that and then you come and start talking that people are too corrupt. I’m not justifying people collect bribes because I’ve never taken bribe in my life. But I’m telling you that more than just shouting and mouthing it, you have to deal with it through policy for it to be effective. I am not one of the people who believe that Nigerians are innately corrupt. When I was growing up, women will put their wears by the roadside and they will indicate that they are selling that product with three stones. People will com e and they will drop the exact price of money. Nobody will take those wears without putting the money and nobody will come and take the money. I saw it. So, are you saying that Nigerians are innately corrupt? A system that will produce a group of people that will pay for wears without being supervised? What do you call such a system? A system that produce people of high integrity. So, everything has to be put into proper context.
How did we get to where we are now that even if the woman sits down, they will kidnap her and ask for ransom? That’s a Nigeria than the Nigeria that I saw. There have been some kind of economic and social change that have programmed people to behave in such a way and it’s the comprehensive social engineering programme that we have to do through policy to turn Nigeria back to a path of sanity. It’s not irreversible. But it’s not something that anybody will begin to brag as you are the champion of anti-corruption and every other person that is successful must be corrupt. We have always had successful people in Nigeria and they were not successful because they were corrupt. They were not even in the public sector and they were not government contractors because there is also a dangerous narrative which is making people who are lazy to feel important, to assume that people who are successful, all of them are corrupt. Not every successful person is a corrupt person and the fact that you are not successful, you are not rich does not mean that you have integrity. Poverty is not the badge of honour . Poverty is a curse that we must remove from this land and nobody should run a political campaign of trying to say that you are trying to save poverty. We want more people to leave poverty, to become prosperous. So, we must not run an anti-corruption campaign that tries to make every successful person to look corrupt because it’s also encouraging indolent people. We have to be careful about the narrative and the way we are putting out there.
I have never collected a bribe from anybody in my life. I have not collected money from government in my life or allowances from anywhere. So, nobody can talk to me about being corrupt or whatever. I fought in this country and put my life on the line. I have my own integrity too. There are a lot of Nigerians who have integrity and they are rich people. They are not poor. So, it’s not only “poor Buhari” that has integrity. There are many Nigerians who have integrity. But what we are saying is that we will reform this country from the point of knowledge, from the point of information, not from the point of illiteracy. The problem that we have with mass corruption in the land is something you can resolve through police action. You need a comprehensive social reengineering programme that will deal with corruption at its root.
How do we achieve that national consensus?
I told you that in 1989, we had a national consensus among the civilian elite who were opposed to the military on how to reform the Nigerian State and we didn’t have just Yorubas or Igbos or Hausas. We had everybody. We had Mahmoud Waziri. We had Alhaji Tanko Yakassai. We had from the South, Chief RBK Okafor. We had people from the South-South. We had Madaki coming from Kaduna and all these people. So, we had a national consensus on how Nigeria needs to be reformed. It is the quality of the political leadership that the country is producing now that is making national consensus to be impossible. It’s not as if Nigerians cannot achieve a national consensus. Nigerians in this country once voted for a Muslim Muslim ticket. They had no qualms about that. They elected Abiola and Kinkibe. What national consensus for development could be greater than that, ignoring all the divisions and saying we will cast our votes even for a Muslim, Muslim ticket? The people of Benue had once elected Sir Kashim Ibrahim a Kanuri man to be their representative in the Northern Assembly, in a predominantly Christian State. Our people had no qualms about that. Some Igbos were Chairmen of Council in Lagos. Our people had no qualms about that. This generation is more illiterate, even though a lot of us have assembled a lot of certificates than our forebears in matters of national unity and matters of state and have conducted themselves as people who were ready to forge a united Nigeria, rather than what we have now. One of the problems is the quality and substance of education. When people don’t have a sense of history, it’s very difficult for them to resolve very simple problems.
One of the indices of development is job creation. The World Bank and so many agencies have told us that to stabilize Nigeria, the country needs to create not less than 4 million jobs annually for the next ten years. As President, how do you think you can make this happen?
When we grow the size of the economy, jobs are automatically created. The Oxford economy in Pricewatercooper study of available funds for infrastructure worldwide, there is $78 trillion US Dollars to be spent on infrastructure worldwide in ten years. Nigeria is a country with massive infrastructural deficit that returns above average on investment and therefore naturally should be a destination for infrastructure funds from Edmonds funds, from pension funds globally. The problem with Nigeria is that we have public servants as regulators who are putting stops on the way. They can do road shows to you in France because they will collect estacode to do the road show . The day you take your ticket and come to Nigeria, they will say okay he has come. They will show you pepper. They have an attitude that you have come to make money. They have a belligerent attitude towards investors to start with. I know that as a businessman, when you go there and you are trying to build a project, they are arguing to you why it is not possible. They are looking for all the rules in the book to stop that project. That’s one of the problems.
Investors are also interested in sanctity of agreement, that once an agreement is concluded, it will be followed through, and if there is any deviation from the agreement, the dispute resolution mechanisms will be so swift. It’s not like somebody has violated a business agreement and we are going to court for 50 years. No investor has time for that kind of thing. That’s why we must have a very robust arbitration system. These are things that the Ministry of Justice can handle in collaboration with the Chief Justice of the Federation and the……. So, some of these things are not just simply political. We will rejig our legal infrastructure to make sure that Nigeria is more business friendly so that when an investor brings his money, he knows that there will be sanctity of agreement.
So, the issue of the ease of doing business, why Nigeria has scandalously fallen to 145 in the world is fundamental due to our inability to net infrastructure funds, in as much as we have a high rate of return. If we can net just five percent of infrastructure funds, that’s $3.3 trillion in ten years alone.
Secondly, you have a lot of remittances that have happened in the past from Nigerians abroad, even though we have not had a deliberate, organized investment oriented networking with the Nigerian diaspora, which can contribute a lot of capital for Nigeria’s development and job creation. In 2013 alone, over $27 billion, almost competing with our oil revenue, came from foreign remittances. With an organized strategy, we can up it to a hundred billion dollars in a year. In ten years, that is $1 trillion, just from infrastructure investment alone, and by rejigging remittances, I’ve told you how you can have $4 trillion investments in ten years. $4 trillion investment in ten years will bring Nigeria to become a middle income like Thailand, Chile, Malaysia and other places. It’s not necessarily going to take us to become like United States or Germany. So, it’s a very modest target that will create jobs. Infrastructure creates job .
The other point of job creation is also to integrate agriculture with industry and manufacture. Agriculture does not create value when it just lands in the stomach and he one that cannot land in the stomach is thrown into the rubbish bin. It becomes more meaningful when its tied to industry and manufacture. That’s where the value and jobs are created. So, we have to organize agric and integrate it with solid minerals and industry.
We have a financial sector reform that will deepen the amount of capital available in the financial market. A lot of guys got banking license in cooking books. Some of them were former AGMs and all that. They have been using their banking license to take a mileage on the economy and all they do is to crowd out real investors by collecting all the deposits and giving money to governments through bonds, just funding government borrowing and the private sector is crowded out.
We must reform the financial market in such a way that at some point in time, industrialists gets to access funds below double digits. In China, the lending rate is like 4 percent. In some other countries, it’s less than 4 percent. So, when someone wants to set up a factor in Nigeria and he goes to take money at almost 30 percent, you know that he’s out of the business globally. So, where to start is the reform of the financial sector and to deepen the amount of capital. Reforming the financial sector also means that I want to have more economists, more intellectual, more businessmen on the board of Central Bank, not just bankers who are money lenders. They cannot have effective regulation. Therefore, the Central Bank Governor that you will see me nominate will be the Central Bank Governor that shares the perspective to grow the real sector. What we have had in the past two or three decades is that the Central Bank has been captured by money lenders who are supposed to be regulated. So, the policies that are coming here are not focused on economic growth, job creation, industrialization and development. They are focused on looking after the interest of those who have banking license. You cannot have that continuing and you will have growth. I’m quite aware that the CBN has autonomy, therefore I cannot interfere with the day to day monetary policies because they have independence and autonomy to run that. But I have power as a President to nominate a Governor that will be in alignment with my own perspective for growth. Therefore, I will give you a very good Central Bank Governor that will drive growth, development, job creation and the expansion of the GDP of Nigeria. I will not give you a Central Bank Governor that is going to be captured or that is a representative of money lenders.
The current government keeps arguing that the problem with the country’s power sector is not about generation but about distribution and that in the last 50 years, Nigeria has not built infrastructure. What they have been doing in the last three years is to put infrastructure in place so that they can evacuate what they generate and distribute. How true is that?
These guys are jokers.
This government has been burdened by rising debt profile. Is that not an issue?
There is nothing wrong with borrowing, but what you use the money for. Nigeria is not a heavily indented country. Nigeria’s debt stock is still less than 20 percent of Nigeria’s GDP. Before, it was about 12 percent. Now it has risen by about 8 percent and most middle income countries in the club of Nigeria, their debt profile to their GDP is above 40 percent. United States is almost about 102 percent. Their debt profile is bigger than their GDP. The issue is what you do with the money that you take. Is there a cash flow from where that investment is going? If you take money and go and build a road to nowhere that will not generate any economic activity, that is a negative borrowing. So, it’s not borrowing that is the problem but what do you use the money for.
I will rather, for instance, use a lot of sovereign instruments to give comfort to investors who are naturally positions to do good investments than public institutions and agencies. Whereas, they have refused to provide sovereign guarantee for people who have brought money to invest in the country to back their uptaking counter parties , they are taking loans and bonds directly. When civil servants and politicians take loans, it ends up at the FAAC. The foreign exchange market will go and take it out of the country. But when you back investors who are putting money with sovereign instrument to say if everything fails, you have my back. First, they are spending their money and your liability is contingent liability. That spurs investment in a very harsh environment like that. So, my strategy will be to use my sovereign instrument to give comfort for real investments and benchmark those investment portfolios, rather than just continuously taking money directly and distributing it to civil servants and politicians who will not manage them well. That’s the problem and I don’t know why they are not using their sovereign instruments to give comfort to investors. They will rather be taking money and spending it directly as the government. So, taking loans is not the issue. I actually believe that Nigeria is not heavily indebted, given the size of the GDP. But I have problems with what they are using the money for that we cannot see it.
The campaign train will be hitting the road in a matter of days, not many Nigerians understand the dynamics of economics. Nigerians understand what a candidate has to promise in terms of dividends of democracy. What are going to be telling the ordinary Nigerians to break down this issue of economy ?
It’s so simple that for the past 27 years, I’ve been creating jobs as a private entrepreneur, locally and globally. So, when I’m in government, I will create jobs. Once of the reasons why President Buhari does not understand how to create jobs is that he has been living on government for almost 50 years. He rides on government car, doesn’t buy petrol, so he cannot feel what the ordinary people are feeling. But for the past 27 years, I pay salaries. If you see me ride a car, I bought it with my money. I fuel the petrol . I run my energy sources. So, I feel what the ordinary people feel. So, those who have never created jobs in their life cannot now get into government and begin to learn it. So, I’ve been creating jobs and they can believe me that I know how to do it.
Secondly, I’m going to unite Nigeria, which the APC government has not been able to do. Nigeria now is more divided than at any point in time in our history. I will secure the country and I think most Nigerians are really very worried about security. Security is key to many people, even before economy because without security, you cannot even do your farming. Farmers cannot even go to farm in many states of the federation right now because there is no consequence for those who have been killing other people. They don’t see them punished and therefore there is no deterrence. It’s looking like the lives of the average Nigerian does not count. I will make the life of every Nigerian to count as President and Commander in Chief and it starts from day one. When there is killing and there is consequence , the killers are punished immediately, other people will be careful to run in excitement to want to take other people’s lives. What we have seen is after killings have been done, public officers come to justify why those killings happened. They come to explain to us why those people had to kill other people. There is no explanation for why anybody had to take any other person’s life. What we should be explaining and showing the people I what we have done with the murderer. Your body language as President and Commander in Chief is important for the kind of security environment you are going to get. From day one, I will leave nobody in doubt that I will be a President and Commander in Chief for all Nigerians, not some Nigerians. So, some people have to feel that they have a special privilege to take other people’s lives.