Prince Adewole Adebayo was the 2023 presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). In this interview, he speaks bluntly about Nigeria’s challenges. He said: “I can tell you as we speak today, there is not one single member of the Federal Civil Service or State Civil Service that is living on their salary. Even President Tinubu is not living on a salary.” Excerpt…
Virtually everything wrong is heaped on the government what is the role of the people in terms of governance, is it all government blame all the time?
I think everybody is trying to survive. You don’t grow an economy in survival mode. You grow an economy through productivity and creativity. So when you hire a person in Nigeria, you verily have hired your enemy because the pay you pay the person cannot pay their rent, cannot pay their children’s education and cannot pay for food, so both of you, the employer and the employee are lying to each other.
If you see your secretary coming to work, wearing a dress with lipstick and everything and the hair trimmed, if you just calculate head to toe, you know that she’s not buying all of these things from the money you are paying her. As President Bola Tinubu is the president of Nigeria, you can go ask him whether if he looks at his private secretary or the typist in the State House, whether he knows as an accountant that any of the workers in the Villa is surviving on their salary. So, right from the State House, there’s a problem. So that’s why I said that we need fundamental adjustments and it can be done.
We can go back to those days of Udoji (Committee Report), cost of living allowance, some adjustment and then some investment in infrastructure such that you can afford to have the basic things that you need. And that’s why I keep talking to Nigerians about chapter two of the constitution, which is the map to the greatness of Nigeria. So if you are lost, that is the GPs, go back to that chapter two. If we follow it, many of these problems will be resolved. There will be unity in the country. There will be order in the country.
So we need to make those changes before we can see real changes on the street. Our people are good and we are not the kind of people who can submit to poverty. Many countries are endemic in poverty. They take it as their lot. But in Nigeria, your driver still wants his son to be a medical doctor like yours.
Do you think that the time allotted to the committee regarding the Orosanye Report is sufficient to accomplish the task of effectively merging and scrapping agencies to cut the cost of governance?
That’s the minimum you can do because there’s a similar report in England called the Cadbury Report. How long did it take England for parliament to enact the report? This one has dragged on for so long. It is long overdue. But it’s also a bit and it needs to be updated. I don’t want them to leave it in theory and still want to reform it and they won’t do anything. So let us implement it. It should be the starting point because in life, and that’s why mathematics is very important for leadership. But beyond that, you have to go and deal with efficiencies, because once you scrap the agencies and you decapitate some of them and match them with the other, if you don’t have efficiencies within, then you have a problem.
And that’s where the qualitative aspect comes in. So the government should use this moment not only to implement Orosanye but to go beyond that and enhance it. I don’t see why police cannot be under the Minister of Interior because immigration was part of the police before. So, that journey is continuous because there’s a government office that should be with the president that monitors efficiencies in government, that treats government as if it’s a factory, where you check how many have you produced today, how many projects have you done? So ministers should be undergoing that kind of Singaporean efficiency test, where you test whatever you do so you can do it. It’s a long journey.
What is your take on the current finance embargo on Binance and what solutions can you provide on the matter? Do you think the government is on track with their response?
First and foremost, when it has to do with your government against any foreign entity, your government comes first. So, just let us have the attitude first because if Binance is being sanctioned by South Africa, Russia, USA or UK, you won’t find their people saying they want to take the side of Binance against their government. They will take their government’s side immediately. So what we need to understand is that Binance, in operating in Nigeria, ought to know that they are in Nigeria’s territory. So, first, you must respect the law of the country.
Binance can say they have not broken any law of Nigeria, but whether the government has jurisdiction over Binance, to question them, to sanction them, yes, the government does. The only thing Binance can do is to get lawyers to say, we have not broken the laws. So Binance does not have a duty to help the Nigerian government implement its policy. The only duty Binance has, like any other entity, is not to break any law in Nigeria. If you break any law in Nigeria, you are going to be in soup with the government of Nigeria.
If you are flying over Nigeria airspace as a pilot, you can commit an offence even though you don’t land in Nigeria. That is why when you are flying nowadays from Europe and you are coming to Nigeria, they don’t fly over Niger. They don’t disrespect Niger. Niger has no air system to bring down any aircraft. Niger has no method of enforcing the law. The people just obey the law because Niger says don’t fly over our airspace, full stop.
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So it is good to let people know if we have friends abroad who are following us and our country, we should tell them that there are laws in our country and they should not come and break them. So, the government is right to question them. However, the government itself needs to stop its criminality within the government because many of the crises that you find in the foreign exchange market come from the State House and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
So the government itself should stop being a criminal against its laws, it will be a good example. But it doesn’t mean that because the country’s government has to be perfect before you obey the law of that country. There’s no perfect government in the world. And I believe Nigerians are patriotic people for the younger ones who were born at a time when they can’t tell what patriotism means, I am sure they are learning.
There is a school of thought that says that if we increase workers’ wages, all our problems will be solved. What exactly do you think the solution is to these perennial issues with organized labour?
There are things we need to understand in basic economics. Having more money does not guarantee you anything. Everybody who’s living today has more money than Julius Caesar. Anybody who’s living today has more money because at the time the entire British economy was not up to 1 billion pounds for the first 1000 years of her existence. Purchasing power is what is important. So what we should focus on is what the money can buy, not the volume of the money that is with the minimum wage.
At the time my father married my mother, he was not earning up to 20,000 pounds annually. But you have to increase the volume of housing available. You have to increase the volume of foodstuff available. You have to increase the number of classrooms available. You have to increase the space available for productivity by making sure you ramp up production. As for organized labour, they are a subset of the Nigerian political class. They don’t represent the workers. I am not saying that to insult the present leadership of the labour unions or anything.
No, it is just the structural part of it. Before you can be a member of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) or Trade Union Congress (TUC), you must have a job. And there are more people without jobs than people with jobs. So if you are unemployed, you are not a member of any labour union because it’s only for workers. So the challenge we are facing is how to put more people in the workforce. So they are not as representative as you think.
Secondly, we have to consider productivity and things that can affect productivity. They are the things that labour is supposed to be fighting for or against, not just wage control. If the government brings a policy that is going to affect productivity, labour should know that jobs will be lost. That was the difference between President Barack Obama and ex-Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney when the election was decisive in 2012. When you ask the people of Michigan, who will you vote for? They will vote for Obama, who saved our jobs, not Mitt Romney, who wrote an article; ‘Let Detroit be bankrupt.’
So, those workers are not voting according to ethnicity, religion or any politician that can give them money to mobilize them and settle their leadership, they are voting according to their interests. If you save General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford, you have saved thousands of jobs, you have saved thousands of families, and you have saved millions of people. So, I want labour to engage the government more meaningfully, not just negotiate with N1 million per month.
What matters is you must ensure that employment is higher, that unemployment is lower and that you support only a government policy or a government arrangement that is working towards full employment. Because when you have more people in the workforce, you have a bigger labour base. There are more members of the All Progressives Congress (APC) than other members of the Labour Congress. There are more members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) than members of the Labour Congress because how many people are employed in the country? How many are members of the civil service in the federal and state governments combined? If you say you are a road transport union, how many vehicles are on the road? If you say you are a member of the railway, how many trains, how many train drivers in Nigeria, how many doctors, how many hospitals do we have? Because the economy is shrinking relative to the exponential growth of the population, where were the National Union of Banks, Insurance, and Financial Institutions Employees (NUBIFIE) when the government was selling all its banks? Where were all these people? So I want us to go back to that liberal movement of that time which is pro-economy, pro-productivity.
How can you close all the textile factories? Where are those textile factories around Lagos and Kaduna? Where are they today? That is what labour should be talking about. Why is it that the government is not employing people? That’s because the government is not efficient in doing its duty. With due respect, as bad and as poorly performing as the government is, the labour movement as currently constituted is worse. The efficiency is worse. So we need to have a systemic review of what we want to do. Go and study the life of Tony Ben and those who came from the labour movement in British politics, where they were going before they got derailed by Thatcherism and all of that. So we need to understand that the only way to solve the problem is to get people to be productive. And that’s what I’ve done my entire life.
I always intervene in sector by sector, whether I am interested in it, whether it’s profitable or not, to try to see if I can ignite productivity out of people. So that’s why I have farms, anything that can bring people to be productive. And that is the direction we need to drive our government, don’t worry much about wages for the few. If there is not enough rice in the market and the government is paying its staff N1 million per month, how does that make food available for the unemployed? So, there are many things we need to review.
Labour should stop following the government up and down over wages, deal with the core policy, and deal with the issues of employment and with the issue of purchasing power. The only connection between wages and the price of goods is the cost of living allowance adjustment. If things are rising, you adjust. But you must come from the point of view of purchasing power. I can tell you as we speak today, there is not one single member of the Federal Civil Service or State Civil Service that is living on their salary. Even President Tinubu is not living on a salary.
