Living standards for most people have plummeted. Basic goods are out of reach and unaffordable. Jobs are nearly impossible to come by. Life is a daily struggle for over 160 million people in the active age bracket.
President Tinubu promised Nigerians 'renewed hope.' A year down the road, citizens are groaning about 'dashed hope.'
Living standards for most people have plummeted. Basic goods are out of reach and unaffordable. Jobs are nearly impossible to come by. Life is a daily struggle for over 160 million people in the active age bracket.
The federal office of statistics agrees that those living below the poverty line have increased in the last twelve months. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has agreed too. And the World Bank has not disputed this fact.
Not even the presidency has denied that Nigerians are poorer under the management of the number one citizen.
In essence, the economic scorecard of the Aso Rock is not impressive. Yet, according to government, the outlook is not entirely bad. Things will soon get better.
Federal economic managers still insist that revenues in their coffers have increased exponentially, with leakages blocked; corruption is under check, foreign exchange management stable, investor confidence growing, palliatives distribution and revenue allocation to state and local governments are regular and increasing. Fiscal federalism is healthy. So they claim.
However, local manufacturers are complaining about production, energy (electricity), transport, and spare parts cost; with high interest rates, access to foreign exchange, and heavy tax and debt burden militating against business growth.
Some foreign firms have ceased to operate in the country. Others have relocated (to Ghana) or returned home, or elsewhere. It is no longer deemed profitable to run manufacturing enterprises in a land where the infrastructure is broken, local currency is in free fall, inflation hovering above 35 percent and counting, and energy cost too high, depressing effective demand.
Critical areas such as agriculture and food security are experiencing perhaps the biggest challenge in recent memory: Violent displacement of farmers in the north (east and west in particular); cattle rustling and unstable pastoralism; high cost of fertilisers and other farm inputs, including inaccessibility to these items by genuine farmers when needed; and poor financial support to small and medium farm households.
Ugly still is the wanton attacks on people transporting farm produce or those in storage sites in some parts of the country. In addition, the rainy season this year in the north is predicted to be short and harvest is likely to be poor, all of which will push up food prices, and make food insecurity worse. The picture is bleak.
Facing all this, the working class has remained restive, seeking salary and wage adjustments to cope with inflation. But the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with organised labour, principally, the Nigeria Labour Congress and the Trade Union Congress.
Both bodies have not been able to put up a common front to decisively fight for and win a new payable national minimum or living wage indexed on inflation for workers.
In fact, the Tinubu administration does not seem to take the working class and its plight seriously. Incessant threats of general strike from the labour centres are dismissed by the federal government as "unnecessary intimidation" and "uncalled for" conduct.
Meanwhile, the wage freeze continues, retrenchment threats hovering; salary, pension and gratuity arrears in unviable and poorly managed states mounting; with most workers unable to cope with daily needs: Food, water, electricity, housing, transport, and health costs.
The security situation in the country has not significantly changed since president Tinubu succeeded Muhammadu Buhari in office. However, the rhetoric is less brazen and the steps taken to tackle the situation are more serious on the surface. Yet, the challenge is as daunting as ever, with security profiteers in high places still in business.
As a president, Tinubu seems more focused than his predecessor. His emphasis on the economy and security is apt but not matched by the correct model and results so far.
The IMF model on the economy is nothing but a balance of payment adjustment measure. This is typically short term and targeted towards spending cuts, revenue generation, and tax collection to meet loan obligations and leverage big corporate profits.
The usual avenues of income generation open to the state such as privatisation, rates and fee hikes have almost been exhausted by the accumulative proclivities of this and previous administrations. What is there left to sell, tax, steal, or increase in price? Roads? Tollgates? Or poll tax?
The social sector has been ravaged: Public schools, universities, federal research centres, hospitals, housing, and transport have all become decrepit. Selling them off is still on the cards, but public resistance and buyer lack of enthusiasm remain the obstacle for now.
Amid all the harrowing experiences Nigerians have undergone under 12 months of President Tinubu, the cost of governance per capita in the country still stands as one of the highest in the world.
Privilege, profligacy and waste in the corridors of power portray governments at all levels as insensitive, greedy, and uncivilised. Tinubu is not directly responsible for the fiscal behaviour of sub-national entities, but he sure is responsible for his own personal priorities, such as privileging a yacht for private cruising over the settlement of salary arrears owed to public university personnel.
Politicians are mainly preoccupied with money-making rather than public service. The term itself, 'public service', is now an embarrassment when used by public office bearers because almost every public good is now done for 'private gain': Padded budget, contract award, procurement, oversight functions, recruitment, political and professional appointments, even organising national prayers for presidential vanity is a big boon to ministers of religion, higher civil servants and top-ranking politicians. The profit motive is the ruling logic in government.
The cost of governance is prohibitive. This is so at the three tiers- local, state, federal; and arms- executive, legislative, judicial -of government. And the situation has not abated since 1999 when this republic was ushered in. It is as bad under the present economic austerity for the poor as it was, and remain, under buoyancy for the rich.
Consider the legislative arm, for instance, where N370 billion is reported to have been set aside in the 2024 Appropriations Act for items such as: 'running costs, contingency, and projects for both the upper and lower chambers of the legislature.'
Further breakdown revealed that various budgeted items under subheads such as,
General services, contingency, security, national assembly office, legislative aids, national assembly service commission and, the obscure, 'service-wide vote', did not attract any serious legislative scrutiny and deep cuts to right-size the cost of governance before they were cleared by lawmakers.
Furthermore, why build recreation centres, (re)furnish committee rooms, pay lavish sitting allowances, provide posh car parks for members; and upgrade national assembly key infrastructure; including a whooping N4 billion for a brand-new solar power system when some of these items merely amount to duplication, waste, and recycling of exorbitant privilege.
And did members of the appropriations committee of the Senate and the House of Representatives get N200 million each for performing their lawful duties? If so, they should refund this astronomical amount back to the treasury and be content with the same amount a regular federal civil servant will collect as committee sitting allowance.
It stands to reason that beside the feeling of being robbed, Nigerians are irked by abuses of governance such as these because of the insensitivity of those in power.
Often these highly placed people ignore the plight of working-class citizens who can barely afford a healthy meal per day, and rudely urge them to work harder and sacrifice more for the good of the country, as if the politicians are doing any better, when everyone knows that they are busy collecting unearned and undeserved jumbo allowances for doing what an average civil servant does, not infrequently, for pittance, without commendation.
While President Tinubu is not a member of the federal legislature, his transactional disposition towards their leadership betrays an inclination that is tolerant of backroom deals with ranking lawmakers.
If there is any impression this evinces, it is that a sizable section of the legislative arm is in cahoots with the executive to abuse the governance system. This not only adds to the fiscal burden of running government but also to the misery of the ordinary taxpayer who has to carry this burden as well.
Therefore, we refused to be surprised when the president's 2024 budget was widely reported to have been passed before it was presented, as all interested parties were beautifully rewarded. Unverified.
Thus, the approach to federal budgeting under this administration is to make sure that all transactions are pre-negotiated and settled. That is, appropriations before appropriations proper.
This is not novel. It is how the budgeting process works in bourgeois plutocracies of the west. To budget is, after all, to negotiate privileges and interests; and even to bribe and 'pad' to secure individual and corporate advantage.
In this sense, the budgeting process is a reflection of the dominant pattern of accumulation. The powerful interests around the president sought to impose their will on the yearly national income and expenditure 'food chain' in the country.
The formula for accumulation that the presidency seem to have perfected is to tax the people, collect rents, enrich crony contractors, and share the profits amongst the inner circle.
This simple approach is what Aso Rock, most of the lawmakers, the higher civil service, the IMF, and the World Bank, including the 36 state governors, have mastered and reached an unwritten consensus on without the consent of the multitude. Such consent, unless otherwise imposed by mass protest, is not needed.
Therefore, President Tinubu is following an unreformable path to run an unreformable system. Okonjo Iweala, President Olusegun Obasanjo's coordinating minister of the economy, and now WTO director general, is not unfamiliar with the logic advanced here. Though to save face, she will distance herself from it.
I take the position that President Tinubu has sacrificed the welfare of millions of commoners to make Nigeria a paradise for a handful of his billionaire friends. This surely is not his official public policy intention. But so it has turned out.
Similarly, the president did not intend to dismember the ECOWAS he was chairing. Yet that is exactly what he did when he impulsively threatened to reverse the military coup in Niger against President Bazoum by force of arms.
This foreign policy blunder has today given West Africa a Confederation of Sahel States on the one side, and ECOWAS on the other, thereby dividing the subregion between pro-western states and pro-sovereign states: The very type of division that Nigeria's geo-strategic extra-continental competitor in the sub-region, France, is happy with.
The same France that sought to break up Nigeria during the civil war (1967 -1970), and was pushing Tinubu to mount military action against Niger to set the sub-region on fire in the name of restoring an 'illebral democratic' regime to power in that country.
How Tinubu reads and defines Nigeria's national interest is open to serious question. To simply substitute personal interest, good private relations with France, for example, for national interest, is to misconstrue what constitutes the vital interest of a nation.
On this score, President Tinubu needs as much reeducation as realignment of his personal interest away from France back to the Federal Republic of Nigeria proper.
Kowtowing to the West will not strengthen the president in office and power. What will strengthen him on both scores is meeting the vital needs of the people. It is this that is the core of national interest, not subservience to foreign powers.
Whatever hold such powers may have on the president for his past indecorous conduct in their land is cancelled out once Nigerians are behind him. But you cannot win Nigerians by pleasing France today, America tomorrow, Saudi Arabia and Israel the day after. . . as it suits your fancy.
As long as such relationships compromise the vital interests of the nation: Its security, economy, cultural, and sovereign interests, the government will flounder.
This partly explains the widely circulated story in the north that the president, following the expulsion of both French and US military bases from the Confederation of Sahel states territories, was contemplating the accommodation of these military bases in Nigeria, specifically, the north.
In fact, one is tempted to conclude that, on the foreign policy front, the president has settled for the moral low ground, leaving states such as South Africa to speak for and represent Africa on sensitive global issues such as the Israeli genocide in Palestine, the quest for a multipolar world, the rise of BRICS+, and the reform of the global security and financial architecture, including the subterranean race for a permanent African representative at the UN security council.
On all these fronts President Tinubu has made Nigeria absent. A laughing stock, remaining content with the moral abyss. Nothing serious is our business as a nation. Only personal transactions with friendly state actors matter. How unfortunate!
What then is the redeeming feature of President Tinubu in just twelve months in office? It is this: Revenue mobilisation. He knows how to suck the blood of the poor to feed the rich fat. This is called 'vampire economics.'
Here president Tinubu has done well. He mobilised resources to augment the dividends of (NNPCL) shareholders; the coffers of state governors and local government chairpersons; the legislature; the top guns in the judiciary; and the military top brass, but not the working and toiling masses.
To them, the economic message appears to be, “Hardship shall be your reward until you can sacrifice no more and explode in revolutionary protest. Short of that your daily suffering will continue until my next year anniversary in office.”
By then the campaign preliminaries for a second term will be rolled out. Then and only then will you be integrated into the Emilokan' big tent: Largesse, palliatives, redistributive welfare for area girls and boys, graduates and non-graduates, come one come all. Renewed Hope for a second term. That is your real chance to be rich.
Is that not how the grand corrupt system has been treating Nigerians for the past 24 years in particular? So this crisis is not just about President Tinubu's failure. It is about a system that is not workable.
The national political and economic engine has 'knocked.' Replace it or remain stuck. That is the challenge for the Nigerian people. It is bigger than Tinubu. Reset the system or lose it for good.
Let's hope I am wrong. Dead wrong. In that case let Tinubu be. And let me bury my head in the sky. . . Fly home to return no more.
But remember this, the miracle you cannot see when the ovation is loudest you can't see when everything goes dim. Hope is never renewed backwards, only forwards. In twelve months we the people have not moved forward, only backwards. That is where the Tinubu administration has taken us.
But we can't remain stuck. We must take our destiny into our own hands. That is our natural right as human beings gifted with the instinct to survive... and live free.
Comrade Abdulmajid Yakubu Dauda is the Chairman of the People's Redemption Party (PRP).