GUEST COLUMN: When A Kingmaker Finally Becomes The King By Abba Dukawa
AREWA AGENDA – The feeling of being successful, mostly a lifetime dream success is a nerve calming one, especially if your path is littered with patches and thorns.
It attracts a lot of positive things to you, people hobnobbing and cavorting around you. Indeed success has a billion fathers while failure is an orphan.
This reminds me of the success of the APC chieftain, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu who by the virtue of last week’s presidential election became the president-elect of the largest democracy in Africa.
Bola Tinubu is a dogged, and rugged politician; who in the 2003 election declined former President Obasanjo’s advances for the former’s reelection bid as president, stuck by his gun, and rerun on the platform of Alliance for Democracy (AD), the election that saw other governors in the south-west in 2003 who ran for the second term under the AD lost their reelection bids.
As the lone AD governor, he put himself in a regular collision with the PDP-controlled Federal Government, especially on his creation of additional 37 Local Council Development Areas for Lagos States. Obasanjo’s administration deliberately withholds statutory allocation of the Lagos State Local Government funds for almost three years, still, under his watch, Lagos state survived until Supreme Court ruled that Obasanjo’s administration should release the seized statutory allocation of the State Local Government funds.
As recourse to the decimated Alliance for Democracy (AD) in the southwest, Jagaban was actively involved in the creation of the Action Congress (AC) political party and was able to win back four of the states to AC. Also Despite leaving office in 2007, Ahmad Bola Tinubu did not give up the struggle for forming a formidable opposition party in the country, especially during the 2011 general elections. After the parliamentary elections in 2011 which clearly defined that the People’s Democratic Party would retain the presidency, members of the two parties met to discuss the prospect of forging an alliance that would have a realistic chance of defeating the PDP’s candidate, Goodluck Jonathan. The president-elect looking for a fresh alliance between the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) has been blamed on Tunde Bakare, the CPC’s candidate for Vice-President for refusal to sign a predated resignation letter which irked the leaders of the ACN who decided to opt out of a planned “grand coalition” and decided to be alone.
After the collapse of the 2007 alliance unrelentingly with his immense political influence led to the merger of opposition parties in 2013, three major parties the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) have float a mega platform All Progressive Congress (APC). This grand merger led to wrestled power from the then-ruling PDP in 2015 – a rarity in Nigeria where incumbents are not often defeated. Without Tinubu’s self-sacrifice, there would be no All Progressive Congress (APC) at the centre in 2015 and 2019 despite his interest in governing the country and choice to support contributed significantly towards the emergence of General Muhammadu Buhari as APC Presidential candidate.
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Prior to the ruling party’s (APC) presidential primary election, President Buhari’s associates tried to downplay the former governor’s influence in the 2015 election, aspirations were flagging, he reminded Nigerians that he was largely responsible for installing President Muhammadu Buhari. Even though there was a ganged-up against his personality before the APC convention, the president-elect stood his ground, poured out his mind and fought to win the presidential ticket.
Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu while picking his running-mate, former Borno state governor Kashim Shettima, experienced the biggest controversy as his decision drew the attention of many Christians who say it went wrong and against the tradition of mixed-faith tickets for the presidency.
Going by his antecedents and political sagacity, Tinubu is not just the Jagaban of Borgu, but the Jagaban of contemporary Nigerian democracy and politics and he is an “outstanding politician who has contributed immensely to Nigeria’s democracy.
President-elect won the election at a critical stage when our socio-economic challenge is unprecedented because the outgoing administration will be leaving office with poor economic policies which have put the nation into a spurious debt burden, widespread insecurity, unemployment, inflation and a wide division along ethnic lines.
The task of the president-elect is not an easy job, due to daunting challenges on the nation’s debt burden at the last count, Nigeria is neck-deep in debt hovering around N44.06 trillion in September 2022. However, if the N23.7 trillion CBN loan is securitized, our debt stock could amount to about N77 trillion in June 2023 just some days after the swearing-in of the president-elec. There is a need for the incoming administration to put all necessary policies to bar federal and states government from borrowing and in the case where the borrowing is necessary the said borrowing will be used to fund projects that can generate revenue out of which the debt can be repaid. Another area of great concern is the budget underscores fiscal deficit expansion and the upward trajectory in public debt. Fiscal sustainability will remain a concern as government revenue will be eroded by personnel costs and high-interest payments on debt.
The incoming administration is coming on the heels of unemployment which has been projected that the country’s unemployment rate will hit 37 per cent in 2023. Nigeria’s inflation rate resumed its uptrend in January 2023, hitting a record high of 21.82%. This represents a 0.47% increase when compared to the 21.34% recorded in the previous month.
Nigerians expect the new president to have a team of competent people by ensuring that round pegs are put in round holes and that he should immediately rolls out his economic blueprint, which should be in line with the national development plan. Urgent needs to tackle issues surrounding the fiscal and monetary policies to quickly arrest the dwindling economy of the country.
The incoming government is to quickly review the implementation of the redesign naira notes adding that it has not only disrupted consumption but also production, particularly in the informal sector, the disruption has to be addressed quickly to halt the economic decline and hardship on the nation. This economic situation, in itself, requires not just tinkering but massive reengineering, the managers have to recalibrate their thinking from rent-seeking to production and productivity.
The President-elect Ahmad Bola Tinubu should critically review agricultural policies because we have not achieved much success that can boost the economy and reduce poverty in the land,” he advocated.
Dukawa write in from Kano
