THE EVOLVING COALITION AND TINUBU’S THIRD YEAR
It’s our lot to live with the drama around the 2027 election, writes JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA
The intriguing thing about anniversary and birthday celebrations is that people end up celebrating a year that just ended as though it was only just getting started. When you celebrate your next birthday, it is the earth’s complete revolution through the sun since your last one, the closing of a ring. On that day, your celebration is of the past, not of the future. But in terms of time, you already closed the age you are celebrating. Happy 40th birthday! But you are in Year 41 now. Confusing? This isn’t the place for more explanation on that. Just to say that we are in Year three of the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration.
As part of a review of the first two years of the administration, I got an invitation to appear on Television Continental’s (TVC) Your View. I like the programme because it has managed to not get sucked into the morning shows that appear lost in these ratings baiting shouting contests. You sometimes wonder whether the intention is to elevate the conversation and enlighten the audience or it is just to make enough drama for some social media virality. I like the Your View. You get to have an enriching conversation. I certainly did and it started with a question on what I thought of the first two years of the administration. My answer turned the interview on its head before it even got started.
The anchor, Tope Mark-Odigie, whom I like to call TMO, served the question. I said I couldn’t answer the question without sounding contradictory. That I believed many people would prefer that I speak to the extremes of whether they believed the administration has been woeful or extraordinary. My belief is an economy of 200 million people with its many moving parts requires some nuance in its evaluation. I said that the fundamentals were moving in the right direction, but they had not compounded enough to have a direct effect on the people. One of the hosts, Mariam Longe, interjected to say, “I like how put that. And because you have put it that way, many of my questions have changed”. I believe the conversation evolved from there.
Why does it look like Nigeria always seems to have a worse president succeed the previous one? As though we go from bad to worse to worst in a tragic cycle of incompetence. On the surface, that is what a casual on-looker sees, but there is more to it than meets the eye. Succeeding administrations hand over more woes than they inherited and less assets than they met. The country is then a compounding of failures and poor decisions. One of the most consequential of the avoided lot is the fuel subsidy removal and the exchange rate administration. President Bola Tinubu went at both simultaneously.
The fuel subsidies had been around since the 1970s. At the time, it was intended as an ad-hoc measure, however, it ended up lasting for about half a century. It is not the only government short-term government policy that ended up becoming the norm. As expected, these policies have had an excruciating effect on the Nigerian masses. Food prices and transportation costs immediately shot upward. These tightening measures were tough on the Nigerian populace. One can see this and not lose sight of the early effects of the policies, especially as they are multidimensional in nature.
These two reforms will be legacy defining; they have already had a telling impact across the board and will produce outcomes on Nigeria’s accounts for decades to come. For now, state governments are accessing unprecedented allocations. Last year, they got N6 trillion in extra allocations. The predictability of the exchange rate has inspired a flow of FDI into the country. These reforms have also effected a stock market growth of 111 percent, a record for a Nigerian president at midterm. There is also record profit for big business, as being announced by a lot of them, including brands that consistently reported losses now announcing profits. These, as with other positives I need not recount, are the sweet side of the story.
The seamy side is, having borne some of the pains, the Nigerian masses are yet to eat the good of these outcomes. When should the Nigerian masses expect to count their own direct gains? That is the work that needs to get done, starting from this third year. Ensuring they translate to better living conditions for everyday Nigerians is President Tinubu’s mission for the next two years. The governors are getting more allocations than ever before, I wonder if, for once, our collective expectations of them will reflect what they are getting.
I took more questions from Damilola Banire and Obiajulu Olugbo. The one that’d fit into what’s left of this piece was what I thought of the opposition as presently constituted, as asked by Mariam. I spoke to the conflicting interests of a number of the opposition members. At one point, it looked like a coming together that dependedly almost solely on Vice President Atiku and Governor Peter Obi. That has certainly evolved with former Governor Rotimi Amaechi becoming increasingly visible. It is not a coincidence that we are seeing and hearing more from him. It was also advertised as a coalition to be formed out of the SDP, but after trending for a day or two and the defection of a Buhari-look-alike comedian, the SDP agenda died before it even became a thing. The horse is out of service. There have been claims from one end of the potential coalition and denial of such claims by another. This is June, the elections are about 20 months away.
Whether we like it or not, we must live with conversations and drama around the 2027 election. One cannot do much about that except pretend to be blind or deaf to them. However, that does not stop a committed government from delivering the rewards of democracy to the people. This is the stretch for President Tinubu to make good on his promise.
Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing
