The Insight by Lateef Adewole
Let me start by using this auspicious moment to congratulate President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (GCFR), on his final victory at the Supreme Court of Nigeria on Thursday. It was a well-deserved and highly anticipated one for many of us who have followed the process conscientiously since the pre- primary election time, during the campaigns and the elections, the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT), up till this week when it all climaxed and a curtain was drawn on anything that has to do with the 2023 presidential election, which brought him in as the president of Nigeria, on May 29th, 2023.
Also, congratulations to his vice, Senator Kashim Shettima. Same is extended to their party, APC, leadership and members, Tinubu’s supporters and well wishers globally, many of whom are not necessarily party members, and generally, all good lovers of democracy and Nigeria. It has been a tortuous journey. Nigeria and Nigerians won. This is because, things could have gone wrong, given the shenanigans that charaterised the whole gamut of the presidential election.
This election will go down in Nigeria’s history as the most competitive, in the sense of all that was thrown into it. Tinubu will go down as the most vilified person in the history of Nigeria, out and in office, as president of Nigeria. For many of us, who have witnessed some reasonable number of elections in Nigeria, we seem not to have ever seen anything close to this. And all this because of one man- Tinubu. Was it the hurdles and treacherous games before presidential primary or those after it? Was it the machinations against his success by his own people, in his own party’s government or the external wars waged against him from outside the party?
Just yesterday, I saw a repost of some videos containing prophesies of many “so-called men and women of God”, who claimed that God told them or revealed to them, that Tinubu woud not win the primary election last year, or the presidential election. Others said the elections would not hold. All these before the elections. Immediately after the elections and Tinubu won, another set began another lies that there would be no handover to him, that military would take over or he would be arrested. After he was sworn-in, they changed gear to Tribunal case. They said he would lose at the PEPT. After he won, they turned to Supreme Court and said his victory would be upturned. All these turned out to be lies. Big lies.
These make one to wonder which God these people were actually talking about. Is it the same omnipresent and omnipotent God that we know and believe? It can’t be. This is because, that God is not a liar and will not give false revelations. It is those who lie with His name that are the problem. I have always been of opinion that religion needs to be strictly regulated in Nigeria to prevent charlatans from taking over the pulpits or to weed out those already there. There should be minimum qualification requirements. This is being done in Kenya and Rwanda now, where you cannot just wake up, set up a shop and start fleecing people in the name of God. Also, there should be punishment for unfulfilled prophesy. Enough of this deception all over.
So, today, President Tinubu can now sit properly on his presidential seat, get more focused, devoid of all that court distractions and face his job of rescuing the country squarely. Since taking over five months ago, things have gone haywire. Many things required brutal actions without minding whose ox is gored. However, I have tried to personally excused him on some of them. As someone who believes in his capacity to save the country and turn things around, and have been supporting him ever since, I get all the taunting, questioning, attacks and abuses, concerning the challenging situation in the country now.
In some of my articles since he took over, I have written about most or all of these challenges as well, as I called the attention of the president and government to them, even if I acknowledged many difficulties they face. Personally, I anticipated many of these challenges to be consequences of many radical decisions that needed to be taken; like the issue of the removal of petrol subsidy and the unification of the exchange rates. I have supported such positions long before now. I supported same in 2012, under a PDP administration. So, it has nothing to do with party or the person of the president.
However, the consequences seem to be going beyond expectations because of who we are, as a people. In Nigeria, we take excessively undue advantage of any situation that presents itself to us in our corner of influence. Since floating the currency, if, “ceteris paribus” (all other things being equal), the naira is not supposed to be spiralling downward so fast as we have seen. But, aren’t we Nigerians again? If the pricing is expected to be driven by the demand and supply, what increasing demand has been driving it then? Was it that manufacturing firms are increasing, thereby needing dollars for importation of equipment or raw materials, or what exactly? No, it is not so.
Like the opinion expressed by the Group Managing and CEO of Confederated Facilitators Limited (CFL), Mr Lai Omotola, while speaking at a media parley to mark the company’s 25 years of doing business in Nigeria. He said: “The problem we have in Nigeria are the so-called business elites, who have little understanding of the game called business. They have a reversed mentality of what business is all about.” He stated that the exchange rate is being manipulated by speculators. He called them “market cabal”. These are powerful people who have highjacked the forex market by confiscating all or most of the available dollars.
So, they decide on daily basis, what the price of dollars should be by controlling the amount of dollars from their storage that they release into the market. The initiative was said to have been seized from the CBN because of its inability to make the market liquid by flooding it with dollars. This crazy trend is not driven purely by the need for dollars for any genuine purpose. But, who are these people? Are they not humans? Are they not Nigerians? Why can’t government handle them? Is government powerless? Is President Tinubu aware of this? What is he thinking about all of this? I wrote a comprehensive analysis about this crashing naira two weeks ago.
This is just in one sector. The cabal that controls the oil is also there. But for the fact that only NNPCL has been importing substantially, the petrol we use in the country, and the price being “managed”, if it has been free for all, similar cabal would have highjacked the petrol too and continue to increase the price needlessly, and irrationally too. It is already happening in diesel market where you hear that depot price is N1100. per litre. How? Everyone lies against dollar. Unfortunately, the true price templates for all these imported petroleum products have never been made public due to corruption embedded in them. Those involved manipulate the cost elements and arrive at whatever price they like, without anyone cross-checking them.
The truth is, many of these high prices are fantom. They are not real, just like the exchange rates we have now. They are higher than actual. This is not applicable to petrol price now as I want to believe that government is subsiding it. I was referring to diesel, kerosene, and aviation fuel.
Another aspect is corruption. I don’t even know where to start. Daily, we are inundated with one scandalous revelation of heist after another. How can one person or organisation be involved in $3.4 billion round-tripping allegation? How can it be said that NNPCL and its management have spent over N11 trillion on some fraudulent Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) of our refineries between 2010 and 2022 but they have remained non-functional or that these four refineries posted N1.4 trillion losses in few years, while they had overhead of over N4 trillion, for doing next to nothing? Where do we start?
What about oil theft? The OPEC allocation to Nigeria is around 1.8 million barrels per day. We have been struggling to produce just over 1 million barrels per day. Yet, massive stealing of the crude is going on daily. That being the main source of earning this scarce forex, yet, half of our production is being stolen and we have a government in place. Is the president unaware of it? Why has he not taken any action about it?
So far, the president has focused on the financial sector; CBN, FIRS, Custom and Ministry of Finance. I supposed he is tidying up the lose ends from where the revenues leak. Or, of what use is increasing revenues generation, only to be frittered away through these leaks? The EFCC and ICPC are being reinvigorated with new bloods. When one listened to Mr. Ola Olukoyede, the new EFCC Chairman, at his senate screening, if he walks his talks, a new dawn might have arisen at the agency. All these steps being taken by Tinubu, I want to believe, are foundational, before he moves to the next level.
Like I said earlier, I am always confronted with many questions about what the government is doing about this or that. With regards to many of these tough decisions he still needs to take, many of which will have to touch on the tails of lions, I assumed that the pending cases challenging his seat as the president of Nigeria could be the constraints. Many might disagree but whoever understands how this country is configured, “informally”, how it works, those who pull the strings and so on, would realise he should truly have been at alert and careful at that stage, “ki omi ma lo t’eyin w’ogbin l’enu” (let him not receive the shocker of his life).
Not with more than enough “enemies”, both political and otherwise, he already had for years, stepping recklessly on toes during that uncertain period could be dangerous. Someone might wondered what I am getting at. But, “eni w’eju l’eru nba”. He, who is on that coveted seat, sees and knows better. This could be perceived in the viral video of him and his aides after the judgement, where President Tinubu said: “Ajuri, your job is secured”, referring to his SA, Media and Publicity, Ajuri Ngilale. Same to others.
Now that the court cases are over and he has been victorious with unanimous decision of seven judges of the Supreme Court, after similarly unanimous decision of the five at PEPT, incredible 12-0 in all, there should be nothing holding him back again, if my postulations were correct. President Tinubu is an astute political juggernaut. He is a deft manager of people and resources. He is brilliant, has courage and gut to confront monstrous situations. He is a deep thinker and swift, effective executor. He is visionary and knows how to bring ideas to fruition. These, and many more, are the attributes that made me support him, against all odds. Same as millions of other Nigerians. Now is the time to prove us right.
President Tinubu needs to decide what he wants to be remembered for; a leader who turned around the fortunes of his country and people or one who just filled in the gap and passed, that is if he had not made their conditions worse. Such realisation and decision will determine how he approaches the gargantuan challenges facing the country today. The truth is that, as mentioned above, they are too enormous for one person or one administration to redress in four or eight years, under the kind of democracy that we practise in Nigeria. It is impossible. Things have become too bad. The country has sunk to too deep a hole. But he has to do his part and be seen to have done so.
There is urgent need to first halt further sinking, before attempting to bring it out of the hole, not to talk of raising it up. It will be exhibition of ignorance and unfair to start blaming Tinubu for all of Nigeria’s problems after barely five months. Not with all the catastrophic revelations coming out, as to how the previous administration and its goons of appointees, ruined the country with their criminal acts. How could a government have borrowed the country’s yesterday, today and tomorrow, and we have little or nothing to show for it? It is now common place to hear that Nigeria has forward contracts on crude oil sales to come in many months, even yet to be extracted from the ground.
The foreign reserve has been mortgaged by the CBN leadership under same administration, such that it is said that we currently have less than $18 billion in reserve and could become about $3.3 billion if the future obligations that will mature in few years are factored into it. Yet, those criminals managing it lied to us that we had up to $34 billion. To add salt to injury, that administration was borrowing left, right and centre, as if it was going out of fashion, sinking Nigeria to bottomless pit of indebtedness. Nigeria’s debt moved from N12 trillion in 2015 to N45 trillion when Buhari left office in May 2023. Just within eight years. Where is the money?
So, simply blaming Tinubu’s government of five months that inherited all of these, will be unfair. However, like he has repeatedly said, that he asked for the job and no one should pity him. I am not ready to pity him. I trust him and believe in his capabilities, at the risk of my reputation, because many of my friends think I was “crazy” to have supported him. He has to close eyes, and bulldozes his way to success. “Agbara ojo ko ni oun o n’ile wo, onile ni ko ni gba fun”. Those who have lived on our collective misery as a people, whose interests will be affected by sincere revolutionary reforms, will not go down without a fight.
But, with the ‘abnormal’ power vested in a Nigerian president by the dysfunctional 1999 constitution (as amended) of the country, a sincere president of Nigeria, who means well and ready to go the whole hog, has the tools he needs if he chooses to be altruistic and do what is right. The power at the disposal of the president of Nigeria is enough to make positive impacts on the country and the citizens, if he knows what he is doing and ready to do it. Does Tinubu know what he is doing? Is he ready to do it? Time will tell.
However, I won’t keep quiet, despite being his supporter. I want him to succeed. I want a better country for myself, my children and future generations, just like for other Nigerians. This is the only country that is truly ours. We must make it work. No better time than now. And no better person at this time than President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He can do it. He must do it. We can all do it together. We must do it. It shall be done!
Once again, congratulations to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (GCFR), his vice, and all Nigerians.
May God continue to protect us and guide us aright.
God Bless Nigeria.
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October 28, 2023.