I was shocked Nigerians voted Tinubu despite promising to remove petrol subsidy – Adebayo

Adewole Adebayo, presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, in this interview spoke on the President Bola Tinubu’s economic policies, the rising fuel prices, and the importance of youth participation in politics, among other topics. INIOBONG IWOK brings the excerpts:

What would you say about our democracy in a situation where despite calls to empower the youths, we face rising fuel prices and allegations of intimidation and harassment of dissenting voices?

Well, it’s not unusual because democracy is a concept. It’s a flexible concept. And the texture of it is under pressure from different directions. Those who are in government have some powers given to them by the people. And sometimes they don’t know the limits of these powers and sometimes they go beyond them. So, democracy is a pressure cooker. So the food in the pressure cooker cooks well, because of the heat inside the pressure cooker trying to escape and the pressure cooker keeping it inside. That’s what makes you to have that balance.

That’s why you can have a pressure cooker working for you. It’s never a concluded argument. As different characters attain power, they bring different manifestations. That’s what you see. What are your concerns? Fuel price increase?

That is one debate that we should put an end to because electorally, we decided that we’re going to vote for those who said they will remove subsidy. And the implication of it now is the feedback we’re getting from the market and the feedback we’re getting for the people who are experiencing it.

So, if people change their mind, given the experience they’re going through, and when they have the next opportunity, they will consider that.

Concerning what is happening with law enforcement agents, especially concerning the arrest of the labour leader, Ajaero, and the invasion, as it were, of the office of the Social and Economic Rights Action Program, SERAP, I think, three things we need to know clearly.

One, despite being in democracy, law enforcement must do their work. So, there is no debating that if you are a labour leader, or you run an NGO, or you are a presidential candidate, or someone in government, the police, and law enforcement agencies have the right to interact with you, where they think you have broken the law. So, that is not what we are complaining about. But there is a rule of law.

There is a process of doing things, and especially the timing. When you are doing something at a time when it looks like there’s a conflict with the government over policy issues or other issues, law enforcement should try to be above board.

I won’t second-guess them, but I don’t think that they had reasonable ground to believe that Joe Ajaero was running away from Nigeria forever. So, if he was going for a conference, yes, if you are invited by law enforcement agents, you are supposed to go. But law enforcement agents do have a right, they must send reminders.

So, if you don’t go, they send you a second reminder. And if he travels for an international engagement where he’s representing Nigeria, they should let him go and do his function, and when he returns, they’ll send another reminder. If he doesn’t go, they should get a court order and get him arrested.

So, that is what you should do. Concerning SERAP, I’ve listened to the arguments after I issued my publication on it, or my opinion on it, where I said they need to explain, I was happy to see that they explained. But listening to the explanation, there’s no good reason stated in there.

I don’t know if they are keeping some things because of investigation, but there’s no good reason for stalking them, or going to their offices like that. There are better ways to do investigations these days, if you are doing them genuinely, and not to intimidate people, or to harass them.

I must say something clearly, which you must understand when you run an NGO, all over the world, law enforcement must watch you because NGOs are special purpose vehicles that international spies, foreign spies use to penetrate a country. I’m sure you read the news where the FBI in America is now prosecuting some NGOs in America who got money from Russia.

So, people who want to undermine your democracy can use any institution to do it. NGOs should not be an exception if there’s a suspicion. However, there are three steps that you take. One, if you think that an NGO is being infiltrated by foreign elements, you try to alert them because they may not know.

Second, if you think that they are complicit in working against national security, and the national interest, you do your investigation discreetly, and you let an independent agency like the judiciary be aware of it. Thirdly, try as much as possible to give confidence to the civil society that law enforcement is not being used to support the government of today in its politics.

One of the things I had in mind if I had won election to be the Nigerian president was to stop the police and the Department of State Security, DSS from interacting with the government, and from following politicians around. That’s why in the U.S. we have the Secret Service. The Secret Service does not investigate crimes, or follow you around, their job is to protect the government.

The FBI doesn’t protect the VIPs, it just does law enforcement. If the life of a VIP is in danger, they can alert the police or other people to say go and do something to protect them.

So, we should separate those who follow politicians all around from those who have to enforce the law because that way, there is no suspicion because there are two extremes. Again, you don’t want the police to become a tool of politics or of harassing people, which is essentially what they have become over time and the same thing with the DSS, you have to clearly draw that line.

Yes, because that was why when we were running for the presidency. I knew that one of the greatest mistakes you could ever make was to adopt a policy of removing subsidies because the gravitational force of the market will drive the price towards equilibrium. And equilibrium, not to sound too technical, is where supply and demand meet reliably, and sustainably.

If you have this price, you can continue to supply that product without failure. You should have to get all other costs to get that product to the market, to meet the buyer.

The price will pay you the cost, plus an element of profit. So, I knew that. But you can’t do that because there are so many externalities and imperfections in the system that will not let that be the wisest decision you can make.

More so, with all the noise being made around subsidies, I thought that there was an exaggeration of the fiscal burden of subsidy and these include the burden of palliative, the burden of price dislocation, the burden of lower productivity, and social and civil unrests. But when you put all those other costs together, they far outweigh the cost of maintaining subsidy by a factor of 5 to 1. So, it will not be a good decision for anyone to say, ‘I’m going to remove subsidy as president.’

Read also: Nigerians bear brunt of FG’s petrol subsidy politics

If you had won the election, you wouldn’t have removed the subsidy?

No, of course, I would not. I’ve said it, though the people who scored the highest votes, President Bola Tinubu, former vice president Atiku Abubakar, and Governor Peter Obi, who incidentally was advised by Professor Pat Utomi, said they were going to remove subsidy. The candidate of the Labour Party said he would remove subsidy on day one. So, the issue is a bad decision.

How is it bad?

This has been debated over and over again. And there are lots of people who said the removal of subsidy was the right pathway in killing the evil that has bedevilled our oil and gas sector, not removing it was very unpopular before now. Because like we said, it was a campaign promise by most of the major candidates who said that they would remove it on the first day, or they would remove it at some point.

The so-called major candidates are the major headache of the country because the political elite, and the business elite thought that they shouldn’t share prosperity with the downtrodden.

So, they will collect subsidy on any other thing. They will subsidise the living conditions of the people in government. Whether you are elected, whether you are in the National Assembly, or you are in the presidency, whether you are a judge or anything, your life will be subsidised, your housing will be subsidised, your cars will be subsidised.

They believe that one is not bad. If you are a professor or a university vice chancellor, you will be subsidised, they believe that subsidy is good. But the one that the poor people are partaking in, that one is bad.

Read also: Tinubu approves use of NNPC dividends for petrol subsidy, halts 2024 interim payments

Is it possible that things could change, may be, in the third year of President Bola Tinubu, are we going to see a dramatic change?

Things will always change, whether you change them or not, for good. Yeah, things will change for good, but the price of petrol will always go up. So that one you can’t be sure of until you do what we call shift. In economics, if you are travelling along the curve, you cannot escape demand and supply because you are travelling along the curve, unless you do a shift.

You move from that shift and say ‘okay, you know what, it doesn’t matter.’ What President Tinubu can say is that petrol price will reach N3,000 per litre but Nigerians will not feel it if he makes that promise, I can believe him. But if he says it will not reach that price, he is deceiving himself because two things are moving. Remember that petrol price has a twin sister, who you didn’t mention; foreign exchange.

That foreign exchange is what is even more influential than subsidy. Foreign exchange will determine a lot of things because even if you get Dangote, you get me, you get anybody to have a refinery, their cost is in dollars. Dangote cannot say come and be the chairman or come and be the managing director of my refinery and I pay him in naira, the person will not come.

So, he can’t tell you I want to buy crude. Only you can buy crude from the NNPCL in naira. It is the Central Bank of Nigeria that will suffer it. So, they can’t buy it from outside.

So, the long and short of it is that Nigerians should understand that we have made a choice that subsidy should go by voting for those who don’t like to give you a subsidy.

For that reason, the only thing we can do for the government is to try to talk to them to try to take away the effects by taking the people away from the use of petrol. And then if at a macroeconomic level, you can get off petrol yourself, it is better for you.