Prince Adewole Adebayo was the 2023 presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). In this interview monitored on Channels Television, he speaks on Nigeria’s economy under President Bola Tinubu’s administration and the new tax reforms, among other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU writes

A former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, was quoted to have said at a recent public lecture that President Bola Tinubu inherited a dead baby in the form of economy from President Muhammadu Buhari. What do you make of that?

It’s obvious that the economy President Buhari left was a poorly managed economy. It is like an emergency room patient. As an emergency room patient, your road to recovery depends on a good diagnosis by the doctor. So, if the doctor is able to know the reason why you are ill, he will be able to put you on a solid path to recovery.

What Tinubu has done is to stabilise the patient, but I’m not so sure he has managed to identify the ailment. So, the patient is not going to die immediately, but he hasn’t found a cure.

He hasn’t been able to identify the problem, the ailment that is disturbing the patient, but as an emergency room doctor, he has taken some steps. Some of the steps actually aggravated the case of the patient, but over time, he appears to have one or two wins in two sectors, which is why it appears that the patient is on the road to recovery.

He has managed to get more revenue, at least in nominal terms, and the domestic borrowing that was a feature of Buhari’s public finance has reduced. However, because of other wrong policies, that money he has gotten, in real terms, will not be able to finance a lot of government spending and infrastructure. So, in terms of balance sheet, Tinubu has managed to have a better balance sheet than what Buhari left for him. The second thing that helped them, which, whether is really a good thing to do, was that they rebased inflation.

So, they started counting inflation differently. If they say inflation has dropped to about 20.7 per cent now from 21.7 percent last month, it’s not because the economy is performing better but because the counting has changed. Whether the counting is more reflective of reality, let us see what happens by the first quarter of next year, when they are implementing their budget. Remember that the 2025 budget doesn’t appear to have come on stream yet.

So, we won’t be able to know how that works in terms of macroeconomics. Then, the third thing that has worked for them is the relative fall in food inflation. Food inflation has dropped, and food inflation is a major component of the inflation basket. Since the prices of foodstuffs have come down a lot, it’s not that those at home are going to feel it because it hasn’t dropped to the level where they can feel it, but it has dropped in the numbers.

It’s like you trying to catch a bag of rice that is placed 10 feet above you. Your hand cannot reach it, but if you drop it to eight feet, your hand still cannot reach it, but it’s lower than before. That’s how it is. So, in a way, the economy, in terms of these numbers, is not worse now than it was last year. It’s slightly better but far, far away from where it ought to be.

And if you look at the inflation numbers across some regions for example, I don’t want to sound like I’m mentioning America, as they’ll say: ‘Oh, that’s a different place,’ we are the fourth highest in inflation. Benin Republic, next to us, has inflation barely above one per cent. If you go around the ECOWAS countries, among the countries that use CFA, the highest is Senegal because of high borrowing.

We need an improvement over what President Tinubu is doing… he’s not doing enough, and he’s not working at the rate that can answer the needs of the people

But all the countries around us are at two per cent or 2.7 per cent. Even Tanzania that its economy is beginning to resemble ours in some ways; if you look at the exchange rate and other factors, Tanzania is barely 3.3 per cent in inflation.

So, there is no major country, South Africa that is our competitor or Morocco, none of them is up to five per cent in inflation. We are still at 20.7 per cent. So, we need to get as low as seven per cent before we start to look at recovery from the point of view of inflation.

It’s a better number than before, but it’s not a number that’s going to take you to the Promised Land. So, we still need to focus more on the real economy. It’s likely that the trajectory is that the Naira may fall to about N1,430 by Christmas if they follow the way they are going.

That still doesn’t make you a strong economy, but it means that, at least, people can plan. People will not be holding dollars anymore. People will not be in a hurry to start bidding for money they don’t need in fear that it might rise. Those who have preserved the value of their savings in foreign exchange might begin to have confidence and try to pick up Naira assets.

That may help. But in the long run, what matters is that the budget must perform very well. If you study the IMF reports, despite all the numbers they’re juggling, there’s a report where they concluded that Nigeria’s inflation has been driven by poor infrastructure. So, if we improve infrastructure, transport costs will be cheaper, which will impact food, productivity, and the disposable income left for people.

That will also cushion the effect of the poverty of wages we have in the country. So, the country needs to look at infrastructure and agriculture. Those numbers don’t lie. I commend Dogara for speaking adequately for his party and his people, but I think we should be more realistic in terms of the real economy to grow employment, grow agriculture, grow infrastructure. That requires time and consistency.

Dogara also said N22.7 trillion was printed and injected into the economy through Ways and Means by the Buhari administration, which made the Central Bank look like a joke, thereby destroying the value of the Naira. What was the National Assembly doing when those kinds of things were happening?

Let us understand it. These confessional statements are being made by the same people who came to power in 2015. So, there are two ways to look at it. Look at it as an economist; you don’t blame anybody. You just analyse the numbers as they come in, and you can say it is trending better or trending worse.

But, if you look at the political economy or the politics of it, you will see that they are the same people. If you look back to the Sani Abacha years, you will see there was a time they were doing Ajaokuta debt swap and all that. That’s how a lot of money got lost. In some regimes, they used different things.

In the Goodluck Jonathan government, they used crude in exchange for petrol to perpetrate their own fraud and many other things. You would give crude oil, and then you would expect them to give you refined products.

They messed that up. They messed up the foreign exchange, the money for security. In Buhari’s administration, they went everywhere, but they were famous for the dual exchange rate and allocation of foreign exchange to people who were known and who would later sell it to somebody else.

Many of them who were influential at that time participated in it. When this government came, I think they said they didn’t want to do that, but they are doing other things that suit them as well. If you look into their own manner of awarding contracts and many things that they are doing, I would probably do those things differently.

Maybe, when the next government comes, we’re going to start talking about what they are doing as well. But, I am more interested in what we ought to be doing. What we ought to be doing is not celebrating the end of one criminality and the beginning of another. To say ‘well, these people used to come into the bank and pick the money, but I’m not doing that anymore. What we need to ask ourselves is: Are we governing the economy properly? No, we’re not. And if we want to do that, what are the things we need to do?

What Yemi Cardoso is doing, which we recommended, is that the Central Bank of Nigeria has to focus on monetary management. It has the responsibility for the value of the Naira, for the exchange rate, for the inflation rate. And if it does not help them with deficit financing, if it does not help them to cook the books, the Federal Government would have to manage its finances.

So, Mr. Wale Edun would have to look at his fiscal position and say, Okay, well, on the monetary side, there’s nothing the CBN wants to do for me. They’re trying to defend the currency and make it stable. So, let me now look at government revenue to make sure that I’m collecting more of the government revenue as I should collect. Tinubu is a better revenue collector than Buhari.

That’s not saying much because Buhari wasn’t very good at many things that have to do with good governance, but it’s an improvement that needs to be recognised. But it hasn’t reached the point where we are collecting a sufficient amount of money because if you look at our government revenue collection relative to our GDP, it shows that we are not efficient in revenue collection.

Then, on the side of appropriation, they have not been transparent in appropriation, and they’ve not appropriated in line with Chapter 2 of the Constitution. So, I will not endorse the appropriation, but it’s better. The appropriation is better than that of Buhari in the sense that during Buhari’s time, almost everybody was in their silo, doing whatever they liked, and did not implement any of their budgets at all.

So, I’m surprised that the National Assembly, which consists of almost the same people who were there in Buhari’s time, are now discussing as if they are aliens from outer space. They were part of it. In fact, at the tail end of Buhari’s administration, the National Assembly ought to have impeached him on the basis of the unauthorised Ways and Means.

They were actually called Ways and Means, but they were outright theft of N22.7 trillion. But the same National Assembly legalised it by retroactively adopting it. So, you can’t blame Buhari anymore. There are many reasons they did it, but national interest was not one of them. The question, therefore, is that Tinubu is trying to block some of the holes that he helped Buhari to create, because he was part of the people who brought him to government, who sustained him there and who campaigned for his second term.

So, they are part of the same people, and his people were also there. So, I think they are now trying to realize that they have reached the end of the road with respect to that aspect, but I would rather we spend time trying to figure out how to move away from this style of governance, this style of management of the economy, to one that is more substantive, that is going to create employment, create infrastructure, and actually reduce inflation to single digits, and reduce unemployment to single digits, and let us have a sound economy on which we can build. I’m in for that conversation.

Looking at the graphs and figures recently released from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), do they represent hope for better days ahead in Nigeria and what should Nigerians picture in their minds in the next few weeks or months?

There are two aspects to the study of economics, and it’s deliberate. There’s the macro. What we have been discussing is the overall picture, the macroeconomics. That is what the government is doing by trying control spending, trying to control the prices of money, and trying to manage inflation.

That’s at the macroeconomic level. So, the macro GDP and all of those things are macroeconomic indicators. The way the government can connect is to make sure that people have jobs, that if the economy is improving, or what we want to improve, it can actually percolate to the people and there are only two ways you can do it.

You can do it by creating an environment where people get employment, and they get paid living wages, and they can start solving their economic problems or you make transfers by way of ensuring that you lower the costs of living for people.

If, for example, you slash transport costs sustainably in a community, the people will save half of their cost of transportation. If you do housing, and you can have affordable housing at about 10 per cent of your income, then you are transferring the success to the microeconomics of the households.

I ‘m surprised that the National Assembly, which consists of almost the same people who were there in Buhari’s time, are now discussing as if they are aliens from outer space

But all this discussion, including the long lecture given by Dogara, and the way in which the government has been talking, they leave the microeconomics out of it completely, the affordability for households.

So, it is good that the government is borrowing less. It is good that we are not using our foreign exchange, for example, to import as many petroleum products as we used to do before the Dangote Refinery. It is good that we are in the high season of harvest, and some food will be immediately available to people.

This may not be sustainable when we go outside the harvest season, and we have to go back to the silos to get food, or things like that. But the key thing that will make Nigerians start feeling it is what the government has failed to do. They need to direct the economic resources they are spending to create jobs. And I challenged them last year, and I’m repeating the challenge now:

They should always indicate how many jobs are created in whatever report they give. Because that is the only way by which they can ensure that a hardworking Nigerian breadwinner can take care of his family and say, because the economy has been made better, I am able to live better.

In that lecture, Dogara described Tinubu’s tax policy as revolutionary, as according to him, tax revenue has hit N14.27 trillion, meaning there are some drastic steps in a positive direction. But like you said, the microeconomics of the whole game is what concerns the average Nigerian. So, judging from what he said, do you think Tinubu deserves a thumb-up in some specific areas, such as the tax reforms?

Everybody knows that Tinubu, even in his private life, is a well-known tax collector. So, that tax collector experience is an improvement over the disorganised system that he met on the ground. He did tax collection in Lagos; he’s going to do tax collection in Abuja now. The problem is that the grandiose speeches of Dogara are overstating it. This reform is okay. It’s not the best, but it’s far better than what they had before.

But they’re overselling it because what we need to understand is that they’ve done so many other things that have made the N14 trillion they are collecting now not worth the paper on which it is written, compared to what they met on the ground. So, if you do it in real value, what can you buy? The purchasing power of the N14 trillion is not as sound as N7 trillion in the previous year.

So, let us not over-celebrate that, but it’s a good thing to have a tax policy that the people who are running the administration understand. I have a better tax policy than that, but I’m not running the government. This is the one they want to use. When SDP wins and I come in, I’ll give you a fairer, more equitable, and more realistic tax system that increases the GDP.

The problem you’re going to have is if you tax people out of productivity instead of taxing them into productivity is that people will stop spending, no new jobs are created, no new fields open, and the economy is shrinking. The economy will shrink because you are not creating infrastructure out of the money, and you’re not creating new fields.

There are so many aspects of our national life that we are not investing in. And if you don’t make investments, your GDP will not grow. If you don’t have sufficient investment, your GDP will not grow. If it doesn’t grow, especially above your population growth, you are in serious trouble, no matter how good a tax collector you are.

Recently, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar said the manner this government is running things is likely to cause revolution and uprising in the country. Do you think Atiku’s analysis of the situation aligns with the realities of the average person in Nigeria?

Well, the situation at hand is not salutary for any Nigerian, the average Nigerian, at least. But I don’t subscribe to the point that it means a revolution or anything.

It just means a change of government, a democratic change of government, so that we can have a change of policy. Even before we have a change of government in 2027, I am more interested in the government of today having a change of policy and an enhancement of policy.

Our problems are not difficult to solve. If anyone comes to me today and says, ‘let’s do a revolution in Nigeria,’ I’ll say, ‘don’t do anything like that, just make simple changes.

’ You don’t need the Arab Spring; you don’t need any of those things. What you need is a more accountable government, a government that is more responsive and smarter in the management of our resources. So, we need an improvement over what President Tinubu is doing. He’s doing something, but he’s not doing enough, and he’s not working at the rate that can answer the needs of the people.

There’s nothing the government is doing that’s illegal, unlawful, or unconstitutional that you want to do a revolution against them. You just need to keep pointing out the weaknesses in the policies they’re bringing forward, the gaps in those policies. For example, I’ll give you a better tax situation. I will give you GDP growth of no less than 12 per cent because that’s the GDP growth you need if you are going to be able to deal with poverty.

And I’ve recommended to them, like they just came from Brazil, that they should follow what was done by the Workers’ Party: invest in the people. If you look at the 2025 budget, it’s not an investment in the people. It looks more like an Argentine slash-and-burn kind of budget, which does not allow people to participate in the economy.

The real money that President Tinubu, as a tax collector, is looking for lies in the muscle and the brain of the young people who are not employed now.