Following the conclusion of its inaugural anniversary, President Bola Tinubu’s administration has begun its second year in office. IMOLEAYO OYEDEYI x-rays what should be its focal point within the next 12 months
“For the sake of our country, I wish the government of President Bola Tinubu success, but its record in its first year on security, economy, and nation-building, is underwhelming. There is room for improvement in the next three years. Will we see it? The answer blows in the wind,” said a former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Prof. Kingsley Moghalu, via his verified X handle recently.
Then, the Tinubu’s administration was on the verge of sailing into its second year, but the question on the lips of many Nigerians before May 30 had been whether the President’s Renewed Hope government had truly inspired their faltered hopes and improved their livelihood in the first 12 months.
Reacting to this, a public analyst and research consultant in renewable energy technologies and environmental systems, Suleiman Abubakar, recently said, “It seems there is a growing sense of disillusionment with the current administration. Despite attempts to portray progress, many question whether this government can drive meaningful change and development.
“The concerns raised appear well-founded. As the renowned author, John C. Maxwell, stated, the success or failure of any endeavor ultimately rests on the quality of leadership,” he tweeted.
However, in the past few days, many Nigerians, including informed economic stakeholders in the country, have expressed conflicting viewpoints on Tinubu’s administration’s first-year scorecard. While some of them, in their keen assessments, have been quick to knock the President, saying his bold but poorly implemented policies have made the economy bled on all fronts, other analysts have so far sympathised with him, saying the quantum of economic misery, socio-political problems, and security crisis left by his predecessor cannot be solved by any Nigerian messiah no matter the strength of his political will.
Those critical of the current administration’s first-year performance had premised their argument on the soaring cost of living and food inflation, which they said, resulted from the ill-implemented removal of fuel subsidy and floating of the country’s currency by the All Progressives Congress-led government.
“Truthfully, this administration has made a bold decision to retract policies that have kept the nation’s economy on the back foot. While the policy moves are commendable, they were not properly implemented. For instance, many Nigerians depend heavily on generating sets and other means for adequate power supply and the public transport system is near non-existence.
“This deepened the negative impact of subsidy removal on many Nigerian’s living standards. On floating of the FX rate, the initial reaction to naira depreciation on commodity prices has worsened general price level and in turn, Nigerians welfare,” one of the observers, Omosuyi Temitope, a lead investment analyst with AfriVest, told Saturday PUNCH.
However, those sympathetic to the current administration argued that its ability to take tough decisions with long-term multi-layered benefits amid devastating situations is remarkable and should be commended because its predecessors had mustered no courage to take the daring but thorny economic path in a bid to rescue the country’s declining fortunes.
Recall that the President, before taking charge, had premised his Renewed Hope Agenda on key national issues such as security, economy, agriculture, power, oil and gas, transportation, and education.
The President had said his government would foster a new society based on shared prosperity, tolerance, compassion, and the unwavering commitment to treating each citizen with equal respect and due regard.
He also said his administration would “manufacture, create, and invent more of the goods and services we require. Nigeria shall be known as a nation of creators, not just of consumers.” Under his watch, President Tinubu said Nigeria would “export more and import less, strengthening both the naira and our way of life.”
He also promised to continue assisting the country’s ever-toiling farmers through enlightened agricultural policy that would promote productivity and assure decent incomes, so that farmers could support their families and feed the nation. The President stressed that his government would “modernise and expand public infrastructure so that the rest of the economy can grow at an optimal rate, embolden and support our young people and women by harnessing emerging sectors such as the digital economy, entertainment and culture, tourism and others to build the Nigeria of tomorrow, today.”
His campaign promises also include “training and giving economic opportunity to the poorest and most vulnerable among us. We seek a Nigeria where no parent is compelled to send a child to bed hungry, worried whether tomorrow shall bring food.”
In the area of energy provision, Tinubu said his administration would “generate, transmit and distribute sufficient, affordable electricity to give our people the requisite power to enlighten their lives, their homes, and their very dreams.”
He also promised to “make basic healthcare, education, and housing accessible and affordable for all and most importantly, establish a bold and assertive policy that will create a strong yet adaptive national security architecture and action to obliterate terror, kidnapping, banditry, and all other forms of violent extremism from the face of our nation.”
Though some observers have said the president’s performance should not be rated yet based on his many juicy campaign promises, the Ministry of Information and National Orientation recently stated that in the last year, Tinubu’s administration was able to reduce the country’s monthly petrol importation by 50 per cent, pay the sum of $1.3bn debts owed to gas firms by its predecessor, attract private investment worth $50m, and flag off the Lagos-Calabar superhighway, among others.
The ministry also said the administration over the past 12 months had launched and kick-started students’ loans with N50bn, began an expansion of Primary Healthcare Centres from 8,800 to 17,000 over the next three years, revived the Abuja light rail mass transit project and established consumer credit scheme for Nigerians with trackable cash flows, among other deliverables.
Also defending the administration, a Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Engagement, Fredrick Nwabufo, in a recent statement, said, “The ongoing epochal Lagos-Calabar Coastal road with its attendant immense economic and social benefits to many states within and outside that corridor, the Sokoto-Badagry road project, and the completed Port Harcourt to Aba stretch of the Port Harcourt to Maiduguri narrow-gauge rail, among other key developments across the nation, assert the all-encompassing and genuine intentionality of President Tinubu’s administration to nation building.
He noted, “Within the first year, the President also approved the upgrade of key health infrastructure and equipment across all six geo-political zones, in line with his administration’s vision of overhauling the health and social welfare sector for enhanced service delivery to all Nigerians.”
“The take-off of the first phase of the Consumer Credit Scheme, which is essentially a mitochondrion enabling citizens to improve their quality of life by accessing goods and services upfront, paying responsibly over time, and by the same token bolstering local industry and stimulating job creation, is another social cohesion sealant – with all classes of working Nigerians as beneficiaries.”
However, as the Tinubu administration begins its second year in office, the analysts in separate interviews with Saturday PUNCH have listed what should be its topmost priority to make the common man on the street greatly feel the touchstones of its first-year achievements.
Sharing his viewpoints on the fresh agenda, Omosuyi said the government should prioritise food security, efficient power supply, and unquestionable fiscal discipline.
“Adequate food and energy supplies are critical to the stability of Nigeria going forward. An actionable state of emergence should be declared in the agricultural sector to ensure that factors that have impeded its optimum performance should be fought head-on. We cannot undermine the importance of fighting insecurity tooth and nail.
“The government should promote fiscal discipline so that Nigerians know that our leaders are not immune to the unintended consequences of the reforms. Monitoring the implementation of interventions deployed by the state government should be a top priority to foster commitment and deter fund diversion,” the AfriVest analyst told Sunday PUNCH.
He further explained what the Central Bank and the economic management team of the current administration must do to address the high inflationary trend afflicting the country and increasing the hardship of the masses.
He said, “The CBN has shown commitment to boosting confidence in the institution through different conventional monetary policy strategies, ranging from market-determined FX rates to higher policy rates and little involvement in the quasi-fiscal activity. The momentum should be sustained, especially with maximum commitment to meeting due obligations and policy transparency.
“The onus lies on the Federal Government to complement this effort by addressing structural issues such as insecurity that has severely disincentivised farmers, provision of widespread food banks, adjustments to the minimum wage, a focus on labour efficiency in the public sector, and a massive drive for infrastructure development, especially the transport system and power supply.”
Also speaking with Saturday PUNCH on the fresh priority areas for the Tinubu administration in the second year, the Chief Executive Officer, Centre for Promotion of Private Enterprise, Dr Muda Yusuf, said while the administration continues with its solid economic policies, it must place huge importance on industrialisation, production, and critical infrastructure to drive deep-rooted economic growth going forward.
He said, “The first thing is to ensure that some of the major reforms currently ongoing are sustained because I believe there is a lot of value in those reforms. First is the Foreign Exchange reform. We don’t want to go back to the era of an opaque FX environment that is riddled with corruption and not transparent.
“So, what we have achieved so far in the FX environment as a result of the current FX policies needs to be sustained. Even as we progress with the reforms in the second year, there may be a need to fine-tune some elements of the reforms, because no reformed environment is perfect.
“We continue to review the reforms in the light of our experiences and prevailing realities. That flexibility must be there because no two economies are the same. What works in the advanced economies may not work the same way here. So, that reality must be recognised, and we need to ensure a modification of the reforms to minimise volatility in the FX market.
“The current level of volatility is too high, and we need to define a band or range within which we can preserve the exchange rate, a sustainable range, given the level of our reserves. I think we can figure that out. With some proper economic modeling, we should be able to determine the level at which we can manage the exchange rate to minimise volatility. That is very important,” he explained.
Yusuf said, “Another very important element has to do with the customs duty exchange rate. Again, this particular issue has been a major problem for many businesses and there is a need for the CBN, the fiscal authorities, and the Nigerian Customs to review it. We don’t like to see the volatility in the import duty exchange rate we currently witness.
“It is making it difficult for businesses to plan. It is even making it difficult for contractors to present invoices to their clients because there are too many uncertainties, and it is also contributing to the high cost of imports due to the high cost of clearing cargo at the ports. So, that is one of the things that in the second year, we need to review around the FX management.
“Thirdly, we need to continue the oil and gas sector reform. Yes, we have taken a major step in reducing the subsidy on petroleum products. That should be sustained. We must situate it within our own reality and political context because removing fuel subsidies has led to many economic dislocations, but it is a necessary policy. But we still need to modify it as we go along, just as the administration has done by incompletely removing the subsidy, which is the wise thing to do. So, we should continue it to minimise the corruption in the petroleum downstream sector, reduce smuggling, and incentivise investment.”
He suggested that the Road Fund Bill passed by the ninth Assembly should be revisited. According to him, over 90 per cent of logistics is by road, so there is a need to do a lot more to review the funding strategy.
“The same thing with pipelines, we move a lot of petroleum products across the country through trucks. This is most inefficient. So, we need to revisit our pipeline infrastructure so that the crude products can be channelled through our pipelines, which will also help to reduce costs. In the area of power, the government should support the private sector investors to build their capacity to provide adequate energy for the economy, which cannot grow without a good power supply.
“Then with industrialisation, we need to reduce the import dependence of our manufacturing sector. This will require the government to support the development of the heavy industries, whose output would form raw materials for the other industries. I am talking about the iron and steel sector, petrochemicals, aluminium industries, and paper industries. All of these sectors are very critical to support our industrial sector. This is very important moving forward,” he added.
Yusuf pointed out that the sub-nationals needed to play a major role in the nation’s agricultural sector, because they were closer to the farmers, maintaining that the Federal Government should mobilise the sub-nationals and local governments to see what they could do to support agriculture.
However, within the next six months when another scorecard will be compiled, Nigerians hope that President Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda will be achieved to a substantial extent.