I will first and foremost like to commend our dear brother Mr. Niran Olayinka for penning on page 18 of today’s ThisDay Newspaper, this simply but beautifully written analytical article on President Tinubu’s recently deployed or unveiled economic reform policies.
The beauty of the article is its easily accessible language that was devoid of the typical technical arrogance and complexity one usually encounters with seasoned economists of his caliber. His analysis, while being technically sound, adopts a language that is accessible to the “common man”.
Contextualized in a church sermon and the well-known story of David and Goliath, the article sets the tone that everyone was welcomed aboard. The analogy of David being mocked by his own brothers is also apt.
The most virulent critics of President Tinubu’s policies on social media sadly have been his own kindreds, the Yoruba. Of course, being the cosmopolitan people that we are, we Yorubas do not believe in circling the wagon or being shy to criticize our own, but as is customary with us, some of the Yoruba critics of Tinubu have gone beyond objective analysis and have laced their criticisms with venom, envy and bad belle.
Mr. Niran Olayinka’s analysis on the issue of subsidy removal as has been universally acknowledged is long overdue and a no-brainer. Anytime the government places it’s finger and in the case of the oil subsidy scam, the government placed its two feet on the supply-demand-price equilibrium.
What results is the mafia-style rent collection behavior and insane corruption that have plundered our commonwealth for decades. With the subsidy removed, we have seen the interplay and moderating power of the market on human behavior, on Nigerian driving habits and our consumption pattern.
We have seen drastic drop in our national average petrol (PMS) consumption due to behavioral change but more so, credited to the removal of the incentive to profiteer from oil smuggle across our borders.
Our country can no longer serve as the Santa Claus doling out petrol freebies to our neighbors in West Africa. The perennial long queues for PMS have abated and the economy-crushing traffic jams on our urban landscape have reduced. I was shocked that it took me just over two hours to travel from Ibadan to the airport on a recent visit.
However, in order for the nation to derive the full- and long-term benefits of the oil subsidy removal policy, government must make as its highest priority, the resuscitation and expansion of our crude oil refining capacity, driven largely by the private sector.
We hope the newly created ministry of Marine and Blue Economy signifies a commitment to tapping into all the benefits (up and downstream) of the marine economy including our off-shore oil potentials.
On student loan, while it is a welcomed policy to reduce the obscene over-dependence of our tertiary institutions on federal allocation for their sustenance, we will not get to the promised land without major structural reform in our entire education system and specifically our higher education sector.
The wasteful misalignment between the products of our higher institutions; be it its graduates or its research output or lack thereof, and the critical areas of needs in our economy must be corrected immediately.
Our universities are not churning out the right quantity and right quality of university graduates needed to drive a dynamic 21st century digital economy.
Simply put our tertiary institutions are producing square pegs for an economy’s round holes. Many of our professors are still recycling lectures from the dinosaurian age and are therefore impacting the obsolete knowledge to our youngsters thereby causing immeasurable damage to our economy.
Furthermore, while Mr. Olayinka drew examples from the US and the UK student loan schemes, we must not gloss over what an intractable and monumental national financial crisis the student loan scheme has become for those countries, especially the US.
We need to investigate the crisis in the US student loan scheme for lessons to be learned to guide the deployment and implementation of our nascent program.
Millions of Americans have student loan debt, amassing to more than $1.6 trillion by the end of last year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The burden of these loans has disproportionately fallen on the shoulders of students from the lower strata of the economy. It’s no use burdening a young Nigerian with a loan of 2 million Naira on a degree that guarantees only a spot in the unemployment market.
On forex policy, that is not my forte. However, we have to find the safe middle ground between the corruption-ridden insanity of the round tripping behavior that the CBN forex policy encouraged in which the rich were making billions of Naira from simply converting forex received from the CBN to black market trading, and a free-floating forex market. No sane economy nor a responsible government can afford to leave total control of its currency to the vagaries of an imperfect market where speculative and predatory behavior are rampart.
While Mr. Niran Olayinka highlighted the increase in revenue inflow into the different tiers of government as a result of the devaluation of the Naira, it would not translate into better living condition for the populace until we have full local government autonomy.
We must rescue our local government administrator from the thieving and predatory fingers of the monarchical governors at the state level who have usurped the citizens’ right to elect the people who have the most direct impact on their welfare, the local government administration.
But would rather prefer to impose their hand selected cronies to manage local government allocations as their fiefdoms.
Once we have assured the autonomy of the local given government, we the people must then take the next critical storm to hold them accountable for the judicious use of our commonwealth. We also must elect the best of us to serve at the local government level.
That is a challenge the Ijesha Development Council (IDC) and other communities across the country must make its top priority in a non-partisan capacity.
Tax Evasion
Unfortunately, our country is notorious for this incidence of tax evasion. The Nigerian rich class has gotten away with murder for decades when it comes to not paying taxes. It’s about time they started paying their fair share.
The insane small business enterprise killing unfair taxation that is fraught with official corruption and bribery must stop as Mr. Olayinka has rightly acknowledged.
Anyone who has run a small business can relay stories of Federal Inland Revenue officials imposing insane tax assessment on them for which they have paid bribe to avert their business being illegally shut down.
The predatory behavior must stop and its perpetrators dealt with the full force of the law. The worst crime in the Nigerian tax regimes are the multinationals like MTN that not only exploits the common man with inflated charges but add insult to our national injury by paying little to no corporate tax.
The Tinubu government must put an end to that insanity. My final point however, is that every policy, the Tinubu presidency may embark on would not yield the expected result until and unless the humongous elephant in the Nigerian economy glasshouse has been tamed and slaughtered. No modern-day economy, not even during the industrial age can survive and thrive with the disgraceful level of electricity generation and distribution that has crippled and handicapped the Nigerian economy since its inception.
The ministry of power has become the graveyard of many illustrious Nigerian politicians, including the best of them like legendary Chief Bola Ige and Mr. Raji Fashola, among others.
I wish the new Minister, Mr. Adelabu who has just been assigned the thankless portfolio of Power best of luck, but I am very skeptical.
Frankly, instead of President Tinubu housing the petroleum portfolio under the presidency like his predecessor Buhari did with spectacular failure, one would have wished Tinubu had sent a strong message that our power supply is a national disgrace and an existential threat to its economy by assigning himself the power ministry portfolio in order to deploy every, or all of the federal might to slay the monster that has crippled our economy and reduced it to its Lilliputian status. It’s not yet too late to do that with a cabinet reshuffle.
The power ministry is too critical to our country’s survival not to try an outside-the-box, by all and every means possible approach.
*About the Author: A current affairs analyst, Prof. Wale Alonge is a university Don and Head, Africa-Diaspora Partnership for Empowerment and Development (ADPED) based in Miami, Florida.