Zacch Adedeji: When Academic Brilliance Runs Ahead of Judgment

The recent outing by the Chairman of Nigeria Revenue Service, Mr. Zacch Adedeji, on Sunday Politics, was a blanket verdict on the characters of persons in the President Bola Tinubu administration. Olawale Olaleye writes.

After watching the Chairman of the Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS), Mr. Zacch Adedeji,  fumble on simple questions around basic principles of good governance and sound leadership, it’s easy to come to terms with the reality that, there are moments in public life when a single sentence tells you considerably more about an official than an hour-long interview ever could.

His recent outing on Sunday Politics, a Channels Television programme dedicated to Politics, Governance and Current Affairs, has just given credence to the saying that, it’s better to stay quiet and remain unassuming than to open one’s mouth and clear all doubts, sadly, shamefully.

For Adedeji, unfortunately, that moment arrived last Sunday. Appearing on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, Adedeji undertook what ordinarily should have been an uncomplicated assignment: defend the economic policies of President Bola Tinubu.

His job was clearly cut out without equivocation. Explain the administration’s thinking, provide context to some of its difficult choices and, perhaps most importantly, reassure a population carrying an extraordinary burden that those in government understand their sacrifices.

Instead, somewhere along the way, the defence escaped him. What Nigerians got was something altogether different: a remarkable exhibition of how very easily intelligence can become separated from judgment.

Asked about the cost of governance and the lifestyle of those in power at a difficult economic moment, Adedeji offered, among other things, the fact that President Tinubu walks from his residence to his office as evidence that the President is not living extravagantly.

He said the President eats once a day, has spent long stretches without travelling abroad and hardly attends parties. Then came the sentence that ought to be studied in schools of public communication.

“How much is an Escalade that the president of Nigeria cannot afford?” he asked. How much is an Escalade? Really? That question, coming from the man who heads the institution charged with collecting revenue from Nigerians, was perhaps more revealing than Adedeji intended.

It was not merely the answer that was troubling. It was the frame of mind from which such an answer could emerge.

Nigeria is living through a severe cost-of-living squeeze. Even where macroeconomic indicators have begun to improve, the relief has yet to reach millions of households in anything resembling proportion to the sacrifices demanded of them.

Reuters reported only this week that many Nigerians continue to struggle with food, fuel and other essentials despite improving investor sentiment and other signs of macroeconomic stabilisation.

That is the audience Adedeji was addressing. Not economists at a seminar. Not a gathering of investment bankers. Not presidential aides sitting around a conference table in the Villa. Ordinary Nigerians.

Men and women, who calculate transport fares before leaving home. Families that revise food lists several times before reaching the market. Salary earners for whom the last week of the month has become an exercise in improvisation. Small-business owners confronted simultaneously by electricity costs, fuel costs, rent, taxes and weakening purchasing power.

And the chairman of the country’s revenue service looks into a television camera and asks them, in effect: How much is an Escalade anyway? Therein lies the tragedy. The question was never whether Tinubu could afford an Escalade. Adedeji either misunderstood the question put to him or chose to answer a more convenient one.

The issue is not whether Bola Tinubu, as a private citizen, possesses sufficient personal wealth to buy a Cadillac Escalade. That is beside the point.

A President may personally be able to afford 50 Escalades. He may be capable of buying a private aircraft, a yacht and whatever else catches his fancy. If lawfully acquired with private resources, that would be a different conversation entirely.

The question about the cost of governance concerns public resources. It asks whether a government demanding sacrifice from its citizens is itself demonstrating restraint.

It asks whether the political class appreciates the moral obligation to share, or at least visibly recognise, the burden of economic adjustment. It asks whether official expenditure reflects the gravity of the times.

It asks why the belt appears permanently tightened around the waist of the citizen while government always seems to find another hole through which its own waist may expand.

These are questions of leadership, symbolism and accountability. They cannot be answered by announcing the president’s personal purchasing power. Indeed, “the President can afford it” is precisely the wrong defence where public expenditure is concerned.

The Nigerian state is not Bola Tinubu’s private estate. Government vehicles are not justified by the personal net worth of their occupants. Public expenditure is justified by necessity, value, prudence and the public interest.

For the head of the nation’s revenue service, of all people, that distinction should require no explanation. Walking inside the Villa is not an economic policy. Then there was Adedeji’s fascinating evidence of presidential frugality: President Tinubu, he said, walks from his residence to his office.

One hardly knows where to begin. The President’s residence and office are within the heavily secured presidential complex. Walking between two points within that precinct may be healthy. It may even be admirable as a personal habit.

But what, exactly, does it tell us about the cost of government? Does the President’s walk reduce the number of official vehicles purchased by government? Does it shrink recurrent expenditure? Does it reduce the size of the bureaucracy?

Does it eliminate waste? Does it cut the cost of maintaining government fleets? Does it reduce the burden imposed on taxpayers? Does it put food on anybody’s table? The answer is obvious. But Adedeji just didn’t get it.

Imagine telling a man who has had to abandon his car because he can no longer comfortably afford fuel that the government understands sacrifice because the President walks from his residence to his office inside Aso Rock.

Imagine telling a woman rationing food portions for her children that the compelling evidence of government frugality is that the President eats once daily. These, interestingly, are personal choices, made sometimes on health ground.

They may have been intended as sympathetic anecdotes about the President’s work ethic. In another conversation, they might even have humanised him. But as answers to questions about the cost of governance, they were astonishingly tone-deaf.

There is a difference between defending a principal and embarrassing him with the defence. In this case, his defence became a damage to the president and the administration.

President Tinubu did not need that defence. Indeed, Adedeji’s intervention arguably created a problem where a more thoughtful answer might have earned the administration some credit.

He could have acknowledged the concern. He could have said that Nigerians were entitled to expect government to demonstrate the same discipline being demanded of citizens.

He could have provided figures showing reductions in particular areas of expenditure. He could have identified measures being implemented to rationalise government assets, travel, overheads or procurement. He could have argued that some expenditure associated with the presidency is dictated by security rather than luxury.

He could even have conceded that government must do more. Any of those responses would at least have engaged the substance of the question. Instead, Nigerians were invited to contemplate the affordability of an Escalade. And that is where education collides with emotional intelligence.

Adedeji is no academic lightweight. The Presidency itself announced him in 2023 as a first-class graduate of Accounting from Obafemi Awolowo University. His résumé includes service as Oyo State Commissioner for Finance, head of the National Sugar Development Council and presidential adviser on revenue before taking charge of the federal revenue authority.

This is exactly why the interview was so disappointing. Nobody disputes that a first-class brain can understand balance sheets. The question is whether it understands people.

Public administration is not an accounting examination. Nation-building is not solved by graduating at the top of a class. Leadership requires something that no university transcript can fully certify: judgment.

It requires knowing not only whether something is technically correct, but whether it is appropriate. Knowing when an argument, though available, should never be made. Knowing when triumphalism is dangerous.

It is also knowing the difference between explaining hardship and appearing to mock those experiencing it. That is the difference between book intelligence and public wisdom. And this is where Adedeji’s “book brain” appears surprisingly empty. It is not empty of knowledge, but empty, in that particular moment, of perspective.

Government cannot preach sacrifice from a luxury car. There is also a larger issue that Adedeji inadvertently reopened.

One of the enduring weaknesses of the Tinubu administration’s reform narrative has been the difficulty of persuading Nigerians that sacrifice is equitably distributed.

The administration can make a defensible economic case for removing distortions. Adedeji himself used the same interview to argue that subsidy removal, foreign-exchange reforms and other measures were necessary to address deep structural problems in the economy.

Those arguments deserve to be heard on their merits. But economic reform also has a moral component. If government tells people that an unsustainable subsidy must disappear because the country can no longer afford it, citizens are entitled to ask what government itself can no longer afford.

That is not populism. It is elementary fairness. A government cannot ask millions of people to downgrade their lives while its own political establishment appears determined to upgrade its tastes. It cannot sermonise about patience from behind tinted windows and expect universal applause.

It cannot repeatedly invoke fiscal discipline while the public associates political office with increasingly extravagant symbols of privilege. And it certainly cannot answer concerns about luxury with the astonishing proposition that the president is wealthy enough to afford the luxury being questioned.

Again, whether the President personally can afford an Escalade is irrelevant. Government is not a rich man’s club in which the personal wealth of officeholders determines the acceptable standard of public expenditure.

Government belongs equally to the Nigerian who cannot afford an Escalade, the Nigerian who cannot afford a second-hand Toyota and, more urgently, the Nigerian currently wondering whether he can afford the bus fare home. That is the citizen whose sensibilities public officials must never lose sight of.

The arrogance problem is another leg to it. There was something else buried inside that Escalade remark.  “Please don’t embarrass this country,” Adedeji added after asking how much the vehicle costs.

That was perhaps even more disturbing. Who exactly was embarrassing the country? The journalist, Seun Okinbaloye, asking a legitimate question about the cost of governance? The citizens concerned about the lifestyle of their leaders?

Since when did questioning luxury in government become an embarrassment to Nigeria? A democracy begins to lose its moral compass when public officials treat scrutiny as insolence. Citizens are not subjects. They are not beneficiaries of the generosity of government. They fund government.

The President is not doing Nigerians a favour by being President. Ministers are not doing the country a favour by serving. Heads of agencies are not philanthropists who periodically dispense governance to a grateful population.

They are servants of the republic. The taxpayer has every right to ask questions about how public resources are deployed, whether the official being questioned earns a first-class degree or possesses ten doctorates.

Indeed, Adedeji’s own office makes sensitivity doubly important. The taxman cannot afford contempt. You cannot spend one part of the day persuading Nigerians that taxation is a civic duty and another sounding irritated that they dare ask how government spends what it collects.

Tax compliance ultimately rests on more than enforcement. It rests on legitimacy. People are more willing to surrender part of their income to a state they believe is responsible, accountable and conscious of their sacrifices. The language of tax administration therefore matters. So does humility.

Yet, there is still a defence to make — just not this one. None of this means the Tinubu administration has no economic story to tell.

Adedeji argued in the same interview that the government inherited severe economic distortions and that recent reforms have improved revenue and other fiscal indicators. He also said the philosophy of the tax reforms was to “tax prosperity” rather than poverty.

Fine. Make that case. Show the numbers. Demonstrate where revenue has gone. Show Nigerians the schools, roads, hospitals, infrastructure and social investments produced by increased collections. Explain what would have happened without the reforms.

Acknowledge what has not worked. State what government intends to correct. That is how serious governments communicate in difficult times. But spare Nigerians stories about how many times the President eats. Spare them lectures about his ability to buy an Escalade.

And please spare them the suggestion that walking a few minutes within the presidential precinct amounts to some extraordinary national sacrifice. That is not economic communication.  It is political self-harm.

There is another important factor to further consider, and it is the danger of courtiers. Perhaps the larger lesson is for President Tinubu himself.

Every President needs defenders. But no President needs courtiers. Defenders interrogate facts before speaking. Courtiers interpret every question as an attack. Defenders know that acknowledging a weakness does not amount to betraying the principal. Courtiers believe loyalty requires pretending that no weakness exists.

And, eventually, courtiers become dangerous because they construct around power an alternative reality in which everything is wonderful, every criticism malicious and every public complaint evidence of ingratitude. That bubble is fatal to governments.

President Tinubu needs people around him who can tell him when Nigerians are hurting, not people competing to produce ever more inventive explanations for why Nigerians should stop complaining. He needs aides and appointees capable of reading a room.

He needs men and women who understand that economic reforms are not experienced as charts, indices and fiscal projections in Nigerian homes. They are experienced at fuel stations, supermarkets, school gates, pharmacies and markets.

Adedeji’s television appearance suggests this is a lesson some people in government still need to learn. A first class is not a licence for first-class insensitivity. This is what ultimately makes the episode painful. Adedeji is supposed to represent one of the administration’s brighter technocratic faces. That is why more should be expected of him.

Academic accomplishment should broaden perspective, not narrow it. Expertise should create clarity, not arrogance. A brilliant accountant should understand better than most that expenditure is not justified simply because somebody can afford it.

And a revenue administrator should understand better than most that every naira government spends originates somewhere — from taxes, oil receipts, levies, borrowing or other resources belonging ultimately to the Nigerian people.

The fellow asking, “How much is an Escalade?” may therefore wish to remember that, for millions of Nigerians, the real question today is much smaller.

How much is a bag of rice? How much is transport to work? How much is school fees? How much is rent? How much is medication? How much will it cost to feed the children tomorrow? Those are the questions occupying Nigerian minds.

Against them, the Escalade question does not merely sound insensitive. It sounds obscene. Public office demands more than certificates. It demands empathy, proportion, restraint and an instinctive recognition that power is held in trust.

When officials become so disconnected from the governed that legitimate questions about official luxury irritate them, something fundamental has gone wrong.

And when they begin to sound as though Nigerians should be grateful merely because those in power have agreed to govern them, then perhaps they have stayed too long inside the bubble of office.

Mr. Adedeji may indeed possess an excellent academic brain. His records say as much. But on Sunday Politics, this week, faced with a simple question requiring empathy, judgment and perspective, the celebrated “book brain” produced an astonishingly empty answer.

And perhaps that is the lesson worth taking away from the entire episode: A first-class degree may get a man into the room. It does not automatically teach him how to read it.