Selecting a team should transcend ethnic bias – Botti

In this interview with Weekend Trust, the programme coordinator of the Social Development Integrated Centre (Social Action), Nigeria, Mr Isaac Botti, reviewed the performance of President Bola Tinubu’s economic management team, one year after its inauguration and how the policies of this administration have impacted on the people.   Last year, President Bola Tinubu inaugurated […]

In this interview with Weekend Trust, the programme coordinator of the Social Development Integrated Centre (Social Action), Nigeria, Mr Isaac Botti, reviewed the performance of President Bola Tinubu’s economic management team, one year after its inauguration and how the policies of this administration have impacted on the people.

 

Last year, President Bola Tinubu inaugurated the over 30-member economic management team. How would you review the performance of the team, one year after their inauguration?

The first thing is that it is important for any administration that comes on board to come up with ideas and an agenda on how best to run the economy. I think that is why President Tinubu set up the economic team.

Before the administration came on board, there were several issues that bordered on the retrogressive nature of the economy. What we witnessed before the administration came on board was that the economy was struggling financially. The then government had to rely significantly on borrowing to run its activities.

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It was also during the same period that we saw inflation spiralling and there was reduction in government’s revenue. We also experienced debts, such that what we called revenue ratio jumped to over 100. We were spending so much of our revenue to service debts.

Tinubu has a fantastic economic team with good ideas. They are great guys coming up with some very good ideas of how they think they could resuscitate the economy, but some of the policies the president has been implementing since he came on board are counterproductive to the tenets and ideas of the economic team.

You have an economic team that is targeting at improving the country’s revenue, which is fine. You also have an economy that looks at how to reduce borrowing and make more money from the non-oil sector. And we have an economic team that is looking at how to spend the money to better the lots of the people.

 

What do you think the economic team can do since they were set up to help the government stabilise and grow the economy?

One of the things the economy team should do is to first divorce their thinking of just generating money. They should come up with concrete programmes that will allow them to spend the money in such a way that the masses will benefit.

The question is: In what areas are the masses benefitting? You need to subsidise education, health care and transport services. I can tell you that we do not have a government with transport services, except in Lagos State. In Abuja, for example, we don’t have a transport structure by the government that can cushion the effects of prices of petroleum products, which have gone up.

Let us have an alternative means of transportation. You came up with CNLG, that is the use of gas, but the cost of conversion alone cannot be afforded by the majority, not to talk about the safety issue around it.

So, the economic team should be able to look at the issues again – What levels of infrastructure should we invest in? What social services should we put money into and it will trickle down and positively affect the lives of the people? They should go beyond accumulating and sharing money to governors. The governors don’t have agendas; they have no plan at all. When they collect the money they just go away. That is why they tried to resist the issue of local government financial autonomy when it came on. They did that because they need more money, more allocations, so they need to keep local governments under the control of state governments.

 

Some people, have  complain that the economic team is dominated by people from a section of the country; what is your take on this?

It is obvious. Who are members of the economic team? The minister of finance is a Yoruba man, just as the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the accountant-general of the federation he just appointed.

And these were his ‘boys.’ That is where I have issue with nepotism. These were guys who never left Lagos State – their whole economic ideas are built around what they did in Lagos alone.

Who was Yemi Cardoso before he became the CBN governor? He was a banker. We need the right people doing the right jobs, not because they are ‘my boys or loyalists and I can count on them.’

 

What was the pedigree of Wale Edun that you thought you could hand over the management of the economy to him? What have they done since they came on board?

We need to transcend ethnic biases and see how we can work with the right set of people as a country, those who really understand what needs to be done to revamp the economy.