Hot SourceFormer presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewale Adebayo, in this interview with select journalists, says President Bola Tinubu’s trip to Brazil is a waste of the country’s resources, as what he is seeking exists in SDP’s manifestoes
In faraway Brazil, President Bola Tinubu declared that the reforms his administration have carried out are tough, but like a bitter medicine, once the fever is gone, you would know that the cure was worth it. What do you make of that statement from President Tinubu?
Well, I’m happy that the president is going around the world. I’m happy that he went to Brazil, because if ever his policy life is going to change, we will see whether he changes from Brazil. His going to Brazil is the equivalent of Saul becoming Paul, because in Brazil what the Workers’ Party did to become what they are today and the president was giddy about it; he even posed the question what do they have that we don’t have? And I have the answer. What they have is good leadership and that’s what we don’t have yet. What they have is a poverty reduction manifesto and set of programmes and policies. If you look at Bolsa Familia, which reduced poverty by 27 per cent in Brazil in four years under President Lula da Silva’s government, it is the opposite of ‘subsidy is gone’ that increased poverty exponentially. If you look at the way Petrobras is run compared to the way the president has been running the NNPCL, they are polar opposites. If you look at where Brazil gets its strength from, Brazil is the third largest economy in the Americas. In fact, by purchasing power parity, Brazil is next to the USA.
So, they have a bit of a mixed economy. The government is participating; the private sector is participating. They have indigenous industries, arising from agriculture, coffee, soybeans and all of that. Then they have the high end with aeronautics, defence and all of that. So, the same country that makes a lot of money producing aircraft like Embraer and other companies is making more money just producing plain soybeans. So, the economic policy of President Tinubu is opposite to the one that has succeeded in Brazil. I’m happy that he’s there because by going there, he will see how wrongheaded his own policies are. On the other hand, I am not happy that he went there to spend all that money when the ruler is here. He could have spoken to me. He could have looked at the Social Democratic Party manifesto. He used to be a member of the SDP in good old days. So, why are you leaving the Brazilian type of manifesto which is available in Nigeria and then you are going to Brazil as a tourist to be in awe of the majesty of Brazil and the Brazilian economy as if it is by magic? It is by policy.
Look at them. The Central Bank of Brazil is crying because of 4.5 per cent inflation. We are celebrating 22 per cent inflation, which in reality is 13 per cent. Brazil says it should not be at three per cent. You look at it clearly; Brazil pays people money to go to school. If you study Posta Familiar very well, a family that puts their children in school, does immunization, does all of that, is guaranteed not to see poverty. And Brazil is struggling to make sure that the wealth that it has is better distributed. So, they acknowledged the fact that the problem of Brazil is not about making more money, it is about allocating efficiency that has social consideration. That is to say they want to distribute their wealth in a better way to make everybody more productive. Brazil is having five per cent unemployment. We are having over 30 or 40 per cent, depending on how you look at the statistics. So, how can you now say, I am now in Brazil as a tourist, how did they make it here? So, it is like the person who does not keep good health, who does not take a shower, who does not clean the environment, he looks at his neighbour’s house and says, why do you have to clean? Why is your dress so white? Why are all your children healthy? Just adopt that healthy policy. It is a good discussion and it is a discussion I am willing to have with the president, partisanship aside. You can stay in the government and I stay where I am in the SDP, but we can still have this conversation as to how Brazil managed it because everything that happened to Brazil happened to us.
Agreed that the reforms are the bitter pill that signposts good health when the medicine starts working; in the last two years or more of this government in power, we have seen top policies that have been made, is the medicine working or are we taking malaria medication for typhoid or cancer? Are the realities and the promises or the hopes that are being preached in tandem? What exactly do you think is going on?
Okay, let me tell you, there is a doctor, Bola Tinubu, who has an APP hospital, and he says he treats malaria patients. So, he makes sure the fever is gone. What does he do? If you take a patient there, he gives the patient rat poison. So, the patient would die, and the fever would die with the patient. That’s one way that he cures his own patients. If he has plenty of patients and 15 of them die, he will say I have only five fever patients left. That is not the best way to cure a patient. It’s not every medicine that is going to cure a fever, that’s number one. Number two, he went to the wrong country. He should have gone to Argentina, because his own policy is closer to the one done in Argentina, not the one being done in Brazil. Thirdly, the problem is not breaking the egg. You can ask women, how do you make an omelet? The easiest part is breaking the egg. You break the egg, and all the yolk and the white of the egg spills to the ground. If you break the egg, at that time you have no frying pan; you have not even lit the fire. So how are you going to make the omelet? The problem is that half of our eggs are broken, and nobody has had breakfast. You keep breaking the egg, you don’t see the omelet.
Prince, you are saying that this government is not doing the right thing. Maybe, they’ve put in place the right policies, but they are not implementing them the right way, is that what you are saying?
I am not just saying that President Tinubu’s government is not doing the right thing. There are some governments that don’t do the right thing. But I’m saying that they are not just doing the right thing, they are actively doing the bad thing. And the reason I’m able to say that, is that the president may disagree with the policy of the SDP. We raised the issue of farewell to poverty and insecurity, and we said you have to make social investment. And we said that you can grow your GDP by making social investments. He is trying to grow his own GDP by making social divestment and hoping that Brazilians, because I heard him calling Petrobras to come here, he is hoping that Brazilians, other people who have made social investments at home, and have redeveloped that social investment, are going to bring their own money to come and make foreign investment here. The policy is wrong. The third reason why I think the policy is wrong is that after criticizing the SDP or ignoring the SDP manifesto here, he is praising Brazil. Brazil is the benchmark for today’s discussion. I agree with the Channel TV. You can organize a session where you bring Wale Edun, you bring all the economic team of the APC, and you bring me, and you bring the SDP. We can have a debate for two hours in your session; if they can pay half, we can pay half.
And let us put these policies and explain them to Nigerian people. They are letting their own policies go wrong in five ways. One, they are behaving as if poverty can increase, and economic growth can also increase at the same time. It can’t happen. The journey of poverty must be inversely correlated with the journey of economic growth. So, if you grow your economy, poverty must be reduced. How do you reduce poverty? There are three ways to reduce poverty. One, you do immediate employment for people. You have to configure most of your policies to include employment. Second, you do social investment such as housing, health care, education, infrastructure and basic infrastructure for people. That is why I said he should go and study Bolsa Familia; that is the programme that saves Brazil. Thirdly, you must have systems in place for macroeconomic management, and you cannot cheat in that kind of examination. You must immediately tell the Governor of the Central Bank, gentlemen, meet the Minister of Finance, by the middle of my term, I want inflation to be single-digit.
If you can’t do it, leave my job, let me find somebody else because you have to make inflation to be single-digit. You have to reduce unemployment to single-digit. You must look at those two things, and you must increase productivity. So agricultural productivity is coming down, unemployment is rising, inflation is rising, and poverty is blooming. And then you go to Brazil and say, God loves Brazil more than us, or what? Or you’re asking the question, what do they have that we don’t have? They have common sense, they have good leadership, they understand economics, and they don’t want to cheat the economy. They want to study macroeconomic indicators and make sure that the policies are able to move the needle. It’s like you’re buying fuel into your car; you watch the gauge. If you’re buying fuel in your car, and the gauge is still empty, you ask, is the gauge faulty, or are they cheating you? Now you cannot say, I’ve spent N200,000 to fill the tank of a Land Cruiser, and the gauge is still empty, or less than one quarter.
You say, what happened? They are spending money, they are raising nominal increases in money; they are pumping money into the sub-national, into the state government, and all of that. They are spending all the money on certain invisibles, and they are happy that the economy is expanding, but they are not looking at the deliverables and the outcomes. That is what they are doing wrong. I will have more time, I will break it down for them, sector by sector, aspect by aspect, quarter by quarter, and I will tell them, medium term expenditure framework, and I will do the analytics of it, so that they will see the position. They will realize that they are not just going to Brazil, they are going away.
Ahead of the 2027 elections, politicking has begun in earnest. You saw what the PDP has done by zoning the presidential ticket to the south. What was your initial view when you heard that news?
Well, that’s what they should have done in 2023, because there is a popular demand that there should be equity in the country. So, they have this, at least from the elitist point of view, they have this north-south rotation that they’re doing. So, my only concern is that when it goes to the north, they bring the worst person. When it comes to the south, they also bring the worst person. But if it can be done positively, that when it goes to the north, they bring the best person, so you are voting for them not just because they are from the north, but because they are good for the job. And if it’s the turn of the south, you look for the best candidate also. So, I think, the party can correct its mistake, because the idea of rotation actually came from PDP. They were the ones who brought the idea of ‘turn-by-turn Nigeria Limited’, as Chief Bode George would call it. So, now that they are finally finding their way, they should not assume that that’s the only problem Nigerians have with them.
The problems we have with them is not just the north-south issue, it is the 16 years of bad governance. The luck that PDP has is that as bad as their government was, APC managed to equal them or even top them in mismanagement. Otherwise, Nigerians were not happy with the 16 years of PDP, and I think we haven’t forgiven them. So, it’s good that they’ve done this rotation thing, so as to make it easier for them to allow people to make more substantive arguments as to how to run the government. But I don’t think Nigerians want to see the PDP in power.
Finally, those who say the zoning to the south by the PDP just gave an easy answer or a quicker route for Bola Tinubu and the APC to clinch the election or win the election in 2027. What do you make of that?
Well, who is going to vote for President Tinubu in 2027 with all this suffering, with all the fake promises? President Tinubu said, ‘don’t vote for me if I don’t give you electricity’. Has he given it? He said: ‘I know the job; the job is tough. Let me do what I want to do. If you don’t like it, at the end of the four years, don’t vote for me.’ So, I don’t think if things remain the way they are in 2027, President Tinubu, in good conscience, shouldn’t be surprised if he’s massively voted out. Nigerians have suffered enough. His policies are not working and it’s not about us. Beside PDP and APC, Nigerians have better options. So, it’s not compulsory that if the PDP commits suicide, automatically, the APC inherits the politics. No, what we know is that APC and PDP are like Siamese twins. They are the same company now. They work together. Nigerians want alternative politics. We are looking for a new direction. That’s what people are saying; new direction.
People are talking about a new direction now. There’s nothing new about PDP. Definitely, there’s nothing new about APC. We’ve done change. We’ve done the next level. Now, we are in serious suffering. So, I think we need to understand that Nigerians have options. But if by 2027, something changes in terms of macroeconomics, in terms of security, in terms of poverty, in terms of employment, then President Tinubu becomes competitive. But the way it is now, I don’t think that for the good of the country, even for the good of the president himself, he should just go home and thank God that he’s the president for four years.
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