Tinubu's Manifesto Will Be Looked At Again In 2023. Bola Tinubu, the presidential candidate for the APC, put out an 80-page policy do...
Tinubu's Manifesto Will Be Looked At Again In 2023.
Bola Tinubu, the presidential candidate for the APC, put out an 80-page policy document at a big event at the State House in Abuja two weeks ago. I won't say much about how wrong it is to have a party at the State House because Nigerians don't seem to care about this kind of bad behavior in public.
The State House is the official home of the federal government. It is like the White House in Washington, DC, 10 Downing Street in London, and Elysée Palace in Paris. These places are the official seat of government, the office of the President or, in the case of Britain, the Prime Minister. They are not used for party events but for official state functions.
Even though President Buhari is a member of APC, that doesn't make the activities of the party a government job. Our State House is the center of government, just like 10 Downing Street in London, or the "people's house" as the Americans call the White House. So, for the President to hold the launch of Tinubu's manifesto at the State House was an abuse of power and office. Joe Biden will never use the White House for a Democratic Party event.
Now, let's get to the point of this piece. Tinubu's manifesto is surprising in that it lacks depth, details, and a clear plan, but what it leaves out is even more surprising. People don't pay much attention to oil theft and how he would deal with it, even though it has become the biggest threat to the economy. The document is also very quiet about how he would fight corruption, which is very strange.
In the last 10 years, oil theft has become more complicated and widespread. It is now the second largest organized crime in the world, after the drug business. We have only been producing about half of our 1.8 million barrels per day OPEC quota for the last six months because of persistent and sophisticated oil theft operations. This is a steady drop from 1.3 million in the last two years. The economic loss to the country is very big and bad.
Nigeria has a serious financial crisis because so much oil was stolen. This shows up in the country's inability to bring in enough money to pay for its budget. The government has had to borrow a lot of money, which is very hard on the economy. Who is stealing our crude oil? was the title of a piece I wrote in August.
My conclusion was (and still is) that some governors, politicians, military people, and oil industry executives are involved in stealing crude oil. The Buhari administration has been too busy with intractable security problems to deal with the problem. Because of this, I am upset that a major candidate like Tinubu has almost completely left it out of his policy document. Does he not understand how big and important this crisis is? Who is going to help Nigeria?
The part of the document that talks about oil and gas is also not very technical. The document says that subsidies for fuel will end and that crude oil production will go up to 2.6mbpd by 2027 and 4mbpd by 2030. When the Dangote Refinery starts up in the middle of next year, fuel subsidies will end on their own. It is almost impossible to increase crude oil production from 1.4mbpd to 4mbpd in 7 years. It needs a lot of money, but the IOCs that have the money aren't putting it in.
Instead, they are selling off. Tinubu also says he will finish "critical gas infrastructure projects," such as building pipelines. … It is a waste of money to build gas pipelines without also building gas processing facilities. Gas is not made by the pipeline itself. It can only move gas. So, you need a producer to develop gas fields and get the gas to pipelines. The business case for the investment is the price of gas and the buyer's promise to pay, as well as a long-term agreement to sell and buy gas. The next government has to figure out how to get past this problem.
The document also promises to "implement the Host Community Development Trust," which is a plan to get oil companies to help out communities that are hosting oil wells. I'm for anything that will help the oil towns grow, but I know from experience that giving them money or oil is not the answer. Both the federal and state governments failed to put money into the communities, which led to the unrest. But what has the government been doing with the taxes and royalties it has been getting from oil production? Has the NDDC lived up to what people hoped for? The government needs to talk about how oil money should be used, not how to give money to communities. It will just lead to more trouble.
Watch Tinubu's Full Speech at APC Presidential Campaign Council/Unveiling of Manifesto
If the government can't run the refineries well, it should sell them. It should also get NNPC to run like a real business and create a place where investors will want to invest.
In his manifesto, Tinubu barely talks about corruption, which is a big worry. A country where one person, a high-ranking government official, was able to steal N80 billion all at once is likely to fail and fall apart. Nigeria won't be able to keep going if corruption, oil theft, and lack of safety keep happening.
At every level of the Nigerian government, corruption is common, from huge contract kickbacks and padding at the top to bribery, money laundering, embezzlement, and other schemes at lower levels. In 2014, one of the three main goals of candidate Muhammadu Buhari's campaign was to fight corruption. In the last seven years, he has done some good things to fight corruption, and his efforts have been praised around the world.
For the country to move forward, the next president should fight the monster with single-mindedness and strength. But Tinubu's background doesn't show that fighting corruption will be one of his strong points. For one thing, it's not clear where he got all of his money, and many Nigerians think he's still getting money from the Lagos treasury. Maybe I had too high of hopes when I looked through his campaign plan for a word about how he would fight corruption.
I think the next President will pay a lot of attention to the agriculture value chain as a way to diversify the economy. The first step in boosting economic growth is to get the country to make enough food for its own people and to sell abroad. I think a candidate for president should tell us how to make Nigeria a net exporter of rice and wheat in the next three years. The European war has shown that Ukraine is a big exporter of wheat to the rest of the world, even though it is smaller than some of our Northern states.
Due to the war, Ukraine's wheat production is expected to drop by 13.5 million metric tons in the 2022-2023 marketing year, to 19.5 million metric tons. Nigeria should aim to be one of the top five exporters of wheat by 2028 and one of the top three by 2030. The Anchor Borrowers Programme, which was set up by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and commercial banks in 2015 during the Buhari administration, has done a lot to boost rice production. We now produce the most paddy rice in Africa, with an average of 9 million metric tons per year, up from 4.5 million tons per year in 2015.
So, I want a candidate for president who promises to increase rice production to 15 metric tons a year in the next five years and 20 metric tons a year by 2030, which is enough to export. This is not hard to figure out. We have the land, the weather, and a strong CBN, all of which should make the financing scheme bigger. Modern ranching is a business that lets you make milk and meat. This gives you a different set of business opportunities in the agricultural sector. There is a lot that can be done in the agricultural value chain to help our economy grow and become more diverse. I'm surprised that these weren't mentioned in the Tinubu document.