The former presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party, Prince Adewole Adebayo has faulted President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s trip to Brazil, saying that he ought to have gone to Argentina because their economic policies are similar.
Adewole, a lawyer, also thumbed down for the administration’s efforts to fix the economy, stating that it is not only not doing the right thing but “actively doing the bad thing”.
Speaking on Wednesday on Channels Television programme, Politics Today monitored by Newsmata.com.ng, where President Tinubu’s visit to Brazil was under focus, Adebayo highlighted five ways in which President Tinubu got his policies wrong and challenged the television station to organise a debate between him, Wale Edun, the Finance minister and coordinating minister for the economy, and other members of the government’s economic team for Nigerians to assess.
Reacting to President Tinubu’s appeal to Nigerians from Brazil to continue to endure the pains of his reforms because one cannot make an omelette without breaking the egg, Adebayo insisted that the present reality is “You keep breaking the eggs, you don’t see the omelette”.
In his analogy, the SDP presidential hopeful said, “Let me tell you, there’s a doctor, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who has an APC hospital, and he says he treats malaria patients. So, he makes sure the fever is gone. So, what does he do? If you take a patient there, he gives the patient rat poison, so the patient will die, and the fever will die with the patient.
“That is one way he cures his own patient. So, if he has 20 patients and 15 of them die, he will say I have only five fever patients left. That is not the best way to cure patients. It’s not every vaccine that is going to cure fever. That’s number one.
“Number two, he went to the wrong country. He should have gone to Argentina because his own policy is closer to the one being done in Argentina, not the one being done in Brazil.
“Thirdly, the problem is not breaking the egg. You can ask women. Where do you have problem? The easiest part is breaking the egg. If you break the egg, and all the yoke and the white of the egg spilled to the ground, if you separate the egg at a time you have no frying pan, you have not even lit the fire, so, how are you going to make the omelette?
“So, the problem is that half of our eggs are broken, and nobody has had breakfast. You keep breaking the eggs, you don’t see the omelette”.
On what the government is doing wrong, he said, “I am not just saying that President Tinubu’s government is not doing the right thing. There are some governments that don’t do the right thing. I’m saying that they are not just only not doing the right thing, but that they’re actively doing the bad thing.
“And the reason why I am able to say that is that the president may disagree with the policy of the SDP; we raised the farewell to poverty and insecurity, and we say you have to make social investment. And we said you can grow your GDP by making social investments.
“He decided to grow his own GDP by making social divestment and hoping that Brazilians, because I heard him calling Lula da Silva to come here; he’s hoping that Brazilians and other people who have made social investments at home and have reaped the benefits of that social investments are going to bring their own money to come and make foreign investments here. The policy is wrong.
“The third reason why I think the policy is wrong is that after criticising the SDP or ignoring the SDP’s manifesto here, he’s praising Brazil. So, Brazil is the benchmark for today’s discussion”.
Further highlighting how the government is getting its policies wrong, Prince Adebayo said, “One, they are behaving as if poverty can increase and economic growth can also increase at the same time. It can’t happen. The journey of poverty must be inversely correlated with the journey of our economic growth. So, if you grow your economy, poverty must reduce.
“How do you reduce poverty? Three ways you reduce poverty. One, you do immediate employment for people. you have to configure most of your economic policies to include employment.
“Second, do social investment. Housing, healthcare, education, infrastructure – basic infrastructure for people. That’s why I said they should go and study Bolsa Familia. That is the programme that saved Brazil.
“Now, thirdly. You must have systems in place for macro economic management, and you cannot cheat in that kind of examination. You must immediately tell the governor of Central Bank, gentleman, meet the minister of finance by the middle of my term, I want inflation to be single digit. If you can’t do it, leave my job, let me find somebody else because you have to take inflation to single digit. You have to reduce unemployment to single digit. You must look at those two things, and you must increase productivity.
“Jobs, agricultural productivity, they are coming down. Unemployment is rising, inflation is rising, and poverty is blooming. And then you go to Brazil and say God loves Brazil more than us. Or you are asking the question, what do they have that we don’t have?
“They have common sense. They have good leadership. They understand Economics, and they don’t want to cheat their economy. They want to study macroeconomic indicators and make sure that the policies are able to move the needle. So, it’s like you buying fuel into your car. You watch the gauge. If you are buying fuel into your car, and the gauge is still empty, you ask is the gauge faulty or they are cheating you.
“You cannot say I’ve spent N200,000 to fill the tank of the Land Cruiser, and the gauge will still be empty or less than one quarter. You say what happened?
“So, they are spending money. They are raising nominal increase in money. They are pumping the money to into the sub-nationals, into the state government, and all of that. They are spending some of the money on certain invisibles, and they are happy that the economy is expanding in spending, but they are not looking at the deliverables and the outcomes. That is what they are doing wrong”.
Challenging Tinubu’s economic team to a debate where he hoped to break down the government’s policies “sector by sector, aspect by aspect, quarter by quarter”, Adebayo said, “I can agree with the Channels TV; you can organise a session where you bring Wale Edun, you bring all the economic team of APC, and you bring me and SDP. We can have a debate for two hours in your station. If they can pay half, we can pay half and let us put these policies and explain them to Nigerian people”.