Tinubu’ Mid-Term Assessment: Policy must be about welfare of the people – Adamolekun

By Opeyemi Adamolekun

People matter

Policies are about people. If you take a political document and you want to use that to run economic policy, it cannot work. At the heart of any policy must be the people and the welfare of the people. The constitution is very clear. It says the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of the government.

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When you take a government that does not care very much for its people, does not care if it is secure, and does not care for its welfare, and then you take a look at what is in the constitution, which is a government’s bible, a government’s work plan and the two things that it says is your primary responsibility, which you have failed at, the scorecard is very clear.

An undergraduate economist will tell you that if you do forex adjustments and do subsidy removal at the same time, it cannot be good. There is no way you dice it, slice it, and think about it, that it will turn out well for people. It just will not work.

We have an administration that does not communicate in words about a plan, about a roadmap of where it is taking us, but communicates very loudly in its deftness and its actions. The president said several times that Nigerians need to tighten their belts because the reforms will have outcomes in five or six years, which is fair.

I mean, it is not a magic wand. You do not do reforms today and everything changes overnight. But you also do not ask people that are bearing the brunt of these reforms to be the only ones tightening their belts because, again, in my view, the administration has not done very much in tightening its belt.

I mean, El-Rufai’s son stood up on the floor of the House of Representatives the other day and was talking about the budget and said: ‘how can we be asking Nigerians to tighten their belts and every year in our budgets, we are buying cars, we are buying the same things over and over and over again’. Do we really need that? Can we not show Nigerians that we care by taking some of these things out of the budget?” Now, this is a child of a two-term governor who is now in the House of Reps and, in a sense, is speaking for the masses, if I want to use that word.

The irony of that is interesting. Be that as it may, he was speaking very truthfully about the disparity between what the government is asking people to do and what it is itself doing.

Subsidy

On subsidy, for example, under former President Jonathan, we had SURE-P. I mean, it did not do very well, but there was at least an attempt to say that we are removing money from something to do something else. I might have missed the memo or missed it. I have no idea what the money from subsidy removal is being used for.

I really do like Dr Sobowale’s point about a political document trying to run economic policy for a country. It does not work because at the heart of it, and we see it everywhere, politics ultimately trumps how this administration is engaging citizens. We are about two years into this administration, but political campaigns have started already.

If a government is not concerned about governance, but is just concerned about staying in power, which is the politics of it, there is no way its choices will be independent of its desired results, which is to stay in power. And I think that poses some challenges.

Any government that does not do well with criticism in a democracy is a challenge. My office did a report last week about 20 journalists being arrested under this administration. For doing what? For doing research, saying that the government now has misappropriated money, asking questions.

So if you are in a democracy, where the president is supposedly one of the people that fought for this democracy, but journalists cannot do their work without being afraid, where government officials can use security agencies to intimidate and harass citizens for saying things they do not like. Look, there is a process, so if I have said something that you think labels you or defames you, there is a process through which you can legally deal with it.  You report me, you charge me to court, and you sue me. You do not get a police officer to track me down and arrest me and then, in a sense, make me, if you could, almost disappear if nobody is looking for me. And the Tinubu administration has been particularly bad around its response to criticism.

It is a shrinking of the civic space of attacking citizens and particularly journalists in reporting what they see and asking questions.

I think what some civic spaces are looking at is: how else do we engage the issues? How else do we get more citizens involved? Ultimately, it is not the job of civil society to be vocal, advocate and expect the government to do better. So, the civil society is also getting better at pushing it back to citizens and saying: ‘look, we all live in Nigeria together. Therefore, it is not my job alone to ensure that Nigeria works. If you too want light and good roads, then we need to figure out how to work on it together.’ There has been a lot more conversations around active citizenship and knowing who represents you at various levels including the local levels.

On security

Because of the Bring Back Our Girls Campaign, I am familiar with what happened in Chibok. Chibok has been ransacked at least five to six times in the last two weeks, yet it was not reported by any newspaper. If we are talking about issues of security, I always say it started during the Buhari administration because it told the media to be careful in talking about terrorists so that their (terrorists) activities were not amplified.

Overtime, what happened was that the media started downplaying it a bit and also started framing them a bit. We talk about bandits, kidnapping, and abduction when we are dealing with terrorists in addition to ethnic/religious conflicts, but we are not able to talk about those issues because they are uncomfortable issues to talk about and, again, at the heart of all of it is politics.

Why is it that the Commander-in-Chief says nothing about the full-scale slaughtering that is happening in the Middle Belt? Within a two week period, from Plateau to Benue, almost 200 people were killed, yet there was nothing from him. In a country where people are constantly reminded that their lives mean nothing, it is hard to get citizens to want to agitate or react. It is also limiting what a civil society organisation can do because you can only lead people who want to be led. I can call for a protest today, my whole office would show up, but if citizens are not angry enough or too tired, sick, hungry to voice out their frustrations, then we will continue to have what we have.

Fulani people graze, which is what they do because they are pastoralists. We have grazing paths that people have obviously expanded overtime, but they are no longer sustainable. In other parts of the world, cows do not roam freely to graze. You cannot have cows roaming on the street. The other day, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, was asked about cows now roaming the streets of Abuja, and he described it (cows roaming freely) as either a delicate or sensitive issue.

Now, when cows become a delicate or sensitive issue, then we have a problem.  The way some people have chosen as a way of life cannot take over an entire nation. It just does not make any sense. We can restrict the grazing of cows. For instance, if you want to do free-range, that is fine, you can give them a patch of land.

Lots of states along the grazing paths have given land that says these paths are lands that you can graze openly, but you cannot have your cows freely roaming the streets of cities, it is not acceptable at all. We cannot keep dancing around the issues.  

Opeyemi Adamolekun currently serves as the executive director of Enough is Enough Nigeria (EiE), a nonpartisan network of individuals and organizations.

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