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In this interview with journalists in Abuja, the presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party(SDP) in the 2023 general elections, Mr. Adewole Adebayo, bares his mind on some topical issues including the rotational presidency, suggestions on how best the 2025 budget can be realised and the problem politicians constitute in the way of credible elections. BINTA SHAMA reports. I always wish there will be a good day for Nigeria, but it is not a good day when the finance minister believes the day it goes borrowing in London is a good day. A good day for Nigeria is when Nigeria goes overseas to give investments in the capital market from the excess production that we have. America borrows from within. You borrow from your own currency. I am not quarrelling with them borrowing the currency they issued. When you are borrowing Euro bonds, borrowing currency from other people in other capitals of the world, it’s a sign of crisis. Yes, you can do it but you don’t say it’s a good day for you. If you are anaemic and your neighbour comes to donate blood to you, you should be grateful, but you don’t say that’s the best day of your life because you are not supposed to be anaemic in the first place. They need to run the economy in such a way that we can generate capital for ourselves. The thinking isn’t coordinated, but if they coordinate well and work with us as a population, we should be able to generate wealth for the country. The parameters they have are a bit basic and elementary. Even in those basic elementary parameters, they are not sincere about them. They don’t want to meet them because they are not realistic. The exchange rate they fixed is unrealistic. Given the other measures they have taken, I think it’s lack of coordination that concerns me. I wish for the Tinubu 2025 budget to work. I want them to succeed. I want investors to come to Nigeria. I plead with anyone to have confidence in the economy of Nigeria. That is my desire even though I am in the opposition. However, they are self-contradictory as these contradictions would at the end of the day prove themselves. For example, you are working towards, in their mind, if they are able to succeed, they are working towards 15% inflation, any basic micro-economist knows that you must never have double digit inflation. It is one thing to have a high BP, and the doctors say to you he will only give you medium BP, the doctor wants to kill you because his job is to return your BP to normal. The objective they set, even if they succeed, is a failure on its own. This idea of a thousand mile is not Usain Bolt wins the gold medal all the time. That’s not the philosophy of people who want to win. I saw the minister and I heard him and I understood the philosophy. I am not against him in person. I like him as a finance person who can manage your assets like a merchant banker. There are two things you need to do with the type of our size of our development. First, the fiscal and budgetary housekeeping. That’s the first. The government budgets for itself in the first part of the budget. Then, the second part of the budget signals to the rest of the economy and creates a stimulus for areas they want to emphasize and then use other incentives to encourage others to do investments. They are sending wrong signals. First, in their own housekeeping, they are wrong in the way they are going about it. You cannot never say to anybody, especially someone who understands basic microeconomics that your inflation rates cannot be, not of your unemployment rate. You can do it. You have already got it upside down. If you have a 15% inflation rate, definitely, your unemployment cannot go below 15% because of the way you run the economy. If you listen to the gentleman again, he painstakingly celebrated the idea that they have 25 million households that they are trying to give little money to. Why don’t you have 25 million households from whom you are going to give employment? So you have a social register for people you want to give money but you don’t have a register of unemployment so that you can give jobs. What sense does it make? The idea that you are going to imagine manufacturing by thinking that if you give N50,000 to any enterprise, whether small or medium micro invisible,N50,000? If the person comes to your office to collect the money, he will spend about that on transportation. If you say you want to grow the economy by bringing investors, don’t you understand that borrowing money in the bank is just one of the factors of production. Loan capital, for example, won’t you realize that there are other paper expenditures like labour cost, infrastructure cost, and other costs. If you are driving those costs above sustainability, there is no way you can generate employment or capital in the economy. Yes, they took a lot of lessons not to be like Nigeria. That is what it can mean logically because the INEC chairman is a professor because he must be speaking in some sound way because what Ghana has done is exactly the opposite of what we did. They tried to make their own credible. We tried to make ours not credible even though we invested more in terms of technology, quality of manpower. You don’t go to other countries and find professor emeritus , dean of faculties, vice chancellors coming to be returning officers. Everybody involved knows what to do. The question is if they have the attitude to do it. Three things you must have for a good election. You must go to an election with the attitude of winning or losing honestly. You shouldn’t be desperate. Secondly, those who participate in it must know that it is a constitutional duty that goes beyond putting government in place. It is a duty they owe the society as a whole, so they do it with integrity. Thirdly, they should not expect personal gain from it. Those who come to vote should not expect to sell their vote. Those who administer elections should not collect bribes to administer elections. Journalists who carry the news should be truthful to the country and the judiciary when asked to come and look at the some of the errors should try their best Left to me, we can get there today. What we need and I have advocated it all the time, is that you take the mainstream judiciary away from elections for the sake of the country and the judiciary itself. Then, you must have a constitutional court that you set up, not from the regular judiciary , maybe retired justices, people who are no longer in a promotion or anything like that. You bring them together. When you bring them together, they do three things. The election is not finalised until that constitutional court has looked into it. Two, the person who files a complaint against the election doesn’t have to prove anything. All he has to say is that I don’t agree with the election. It is the burden of prove that the election was in order should be on INEC. You cannot tell somebody who didn’t conduct the election,’ I give you 21 days; tell me everything that is wrong with the election. Thirdly, people should not assume that because you lost an election, it is automatically rigged. That should not be the attitude. There should be fewer petitions based on merit. No doubt that the problems of Nigeria are traceable to the political class. When I addressed the House of Representative recently, that Nigeria needs to rehabilitate the political class because when you have a decent political class, people full of integrity, many of the problems associated with politics or politicians will be removed. INEC itself has a bit of connivance whether for the sustainability of their appointment or whether people have discovered that they can get rich by taking advantage of the desperation of politicians. Most of the problems of the election didn’t arise from INEC. They arise from the political parties. More political parties commit crimes in their primaries than they accuse INEC of. So, whatever error INEC commits, they even commit more. People bribe delegates for elections. Party chairmen and secretary switch names like the game of domino. So, the political class is guilty. I agree with that. But INEC is supposed to be a professional class. In that case, they should not collaborate with the politicians. The issue is this, let’s start with INEC. The problem in Nigeria is that everybody is an expert in other people’s business. It is not the duty of INEC chairman to teach politicians how to politick. His job is to administer elections. Leave them to cross-carpet, that is outside your power. What you should do is to conduct credible elections and monitor your staff to see that you don’t switch elections, you don’t switch off the servers, you don’t do nonsense that is associated with electioneering. Once you have cleaned your own Augean stable, you can have the moral standing to now pontificate for others. With respect to the opposition you talked about, opposition in our system of government is opposition to ideas not opposition on the streets. The problem people have with opposition is that Labour Party ,PDP,APC are all of the same philosophy. We have a different philosophy. We are left of the centre and our policies are different. If you listen to us during the campaign, you juxtapose our policies to former governor Peter Obi, President Tinubu and Vice President Atiku. You will think they were written from the same script. They are in different parties but they believe in the same thing, economic theory. If Peter Obi was in power, he will find another person, not Wale Edun, one who sounds like him. On cross carpeting. It is not a major problem. If somebody crosses from PDP to APC, he hasn’t really crossed. It’s like one moving from one room to another within the same bungalow. It is when somebody crosses from an ideological divide. So, they are parties of the same ilk. What Nigerians need now is to invest the attention, belief and time in alternative thinking. And to say there is no opposition, the job I am doing now is constructive opposition. Rotation is at two levels. You must rotate according to the geopolitical zone for peace to reign among the elite. But you must rotate from the elite to the people for growth and justice to happen in Nigeria. If you are rotating from North to South and all of that and rotating about the same wasteful elite who have no idea , you will be rotating poverty, insecurity and others. But if you rotate from them, in terms of inter-generational, from the old people to the young ones and from ideological rotation from those who follow IMF-WORLD BANK to those who have indigenous ideas and authentic pro-Nigeria ideas, you would have some progress for the country.
Scripps Health Doctors Receive Grant To Develop ‘Smart Shoulder’ Implant
