EDITORIAL: Mid-term: Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda needs renewal

President Bola Tinubu is two years in office today, in a journey that began on 29 May 2023. Unlike the first anniversary, when the ministers organised only sectoral media briefings, the President and his ministers are loudly celebrating the administration’s achievements so far.

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Mr Tinubu flew into Lagos on Tuesday, where, among other engagements, he inaugurated the first section of the Lagos–Calabar coastal highway, spanning 48 kilometres, alongside the Lekki Deep Sea Port Tax Credit Concrete Road. In the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja, another series of project inaugurations will involve roads, bridges, and water schemes in a landscape radically transformed by Nyesom Wike’s widely acknowledged performance as FCT minister.

To the administration’s credit, the country now has a stable supply of petroleum products. The Jim Obazee investigation into the governance of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) that opened the lid on the messy operations there; liquidation of over $700 million in foreign airlines ticket sales debt; introduction of the students loan scheme; a GDP growth rate of 3.6 per cent; the EFCC seizure of 753 duplexes belonging to a former governor of the CBN (considered as proceeds of corrupt acts), reduction of a foreign debt service burden from 96 per cent to 67 per cent, in relation to revenue, rank high among the notable attainments of the government in this first half.

Equally commendable is the legal regime enabling the direct payments of the statutory monthly allocations to the 774 local government areas following the July 2024 Supreme Court judgement granting financial autonomy to the third tier of government. This would hopefully stop state governments from hijacking these funds, as has been the case in the past decades.

It is also now easier to obtain Nigerian passports, due to the Ministry of Internal Affairs reforms under the leadership of energetic and innovative Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo. Coupled with this is a marked departure from the past regarding service delivery at our airports. Crude oil production has been ramped up to about 1.8 million barrels per day due to sustained oil pipeline surveillance, and military operations in the Niger Delta. More so, establishing the credit corps and tax reform endeavours will hopefully move Nigeria towards a more robust fiscal regime.

**Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo**

Mr Tinubu was handed a poisoned chalice by his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, which informed his frenetic efforts to deliver projects and policies, with some yielding mixed and sometimes unintended outcomes. The fuel subsidy removal, which seemingly addressed the subsidy scam that had haemorrhaged the public treasury so badly, and the liberalisation of the foreign exchange market to bridge the gap between the official and parallel market rates epitomised these concerns.

Regrettably, the subsidy scammers and FX round-tripping syndicates have largely yet to be identified and prosecuted, with their ill-gotten wealth returned to the treasury, even though former CBN Governor Emefiele is being prosecuted.

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Indeed, the country could not escape the consequences of those twin policies: spiralling inflation, massive erosion of the value of the naira, and the attendant severe cost-of-living crisis. The naira was N700/$1 in May 2023 but is around N1,600/$1 presently. At one point, fuel was sold for N1,300 per litre in some parts of the country, up from its pre-Tinubu era of N185 per litre.

Accordingly, transport fares and the prices of goods and services have hit the roof tops, leading to massive poverty and hunger in the land. However, fuel prices have tended to moderate gradually, although there has been no general corresponding price drop.

Predictably, mass disapproval of rising costs rocked the country in August 2024, epitomised in the #Endbadgovernance protests. The government’s reaction was quite unfortunate, as it deemed the protests part of a plot to undermine it. As a result, 76 people, among them 32 minors, were arrested, detained for three months, and then charged with treasonable felony and terrorism. It took a huge public and international outcry for the government to back down.

A slew of social safety nets has been launched to address this crisis, but the internal contradictions of corruption and lack of transparency have marred the implementation. At issue is the Conditional Cash Transfer scheme that began in 2023, but whose disbursements were marred by irregularities. Unfortunately, there have been cold feet in bringing the culprits in the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs to justice. A minimum wage of N70,000 has also been implemented, replacing the old N30,000. Ironically, this is much less in value than the old wage once was. Some states are yet to implement it, forcing organised labour to constantly threaten industrial actions.

Headline inflation marginally ebbed at 23.71 per cent in April. The prices of rice and gari bags may have decreased due to the harvest season and other variables. Last week’s CBN retention of the Monetary Policy Rate (MPR) at 27.5 per cent indicates that inflation remains a bull in a china shop. The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) is concerned about the negative impact of this trend on businesses.

The administration could have done better with less profligacy. The N15 billion spent completing the vice president’s official residence, alongside another N5 billion spent on his official residence in Lagos, which is hardly in use; the N57 billion spent on SUVs for federal lawmakers; and the N90 billion doled out to pilgrims have earned no applause for the government. The expenditures were sickening amid endless protests by universities over underfunding.

Mr Tinubu’s presidency has remained unhinged in its borrowing. It inherited a debt portfolio of N87.38 trillion in June 2023. However, as of December 2024, the debt level has surged to N144.67 trillion, according to the Debt Management Office (DMO) data. This is disturbing. The external borrowing plan for 2025/6 sent to the National Assembly on Tuesday, comprising $21.5 billion, €65 million and ¥15 billion, when there are unrecovered billions of dollars of oil revenues from oil companies, only heightened concerns about the administration’s penchant for sinking the country into more and more debts.

The CBN governor, Yemi Cardoso, said in January 2024 that the naira was undervalued and that deliberate steps would be taken to help it find its true value. No visible action has been taken in this regard to date, thus keeping Nigerians in serious financial distress and the economy in turmoil.

In April, an eerie World Bank report warned that more Nigerians would fall into poverty by 2027. It underlined that about 75.5 per cent of rural dwellers live below the poverty line, stressing the mountain to climb. With the 133 million Nigerians said to be multi-dimensionally poor in 2022, the scenario is scarier than ever.

On security, despite the hard work of the military and other security agencies, Boko Haram and ISWAP have constantly kept gnawing at Nigeria’s territorial integrity, with gains and reversals being the alternate manifestations of both the state and non-state actors. In the Plateau and Benue states, mass murders by terrorists and other criminals have turned the areas into national graveyards of sorts. Kidnapping is not abating.

Over 100 citizens were massacred last month in the Bokkos and Bassa areas of Plateau State by gunmen who are yet to be arrested. Later, some military formations in Borno State, especially in Marte, buckled under insurgent attacks. It resulted in the killing of soldiers and the carting away of arms and ammunition. Our porous borders with Niger Republic and others in the Sahelian region – Chad and Cameroon, have been fingered for this resurgence of Boko Haram attacks.

Not enough engagements have been made with these critical neighbours. Mr Buhari’s first trips outside our shores in 2015 were to them, and this paid off in the animated operations of the Joint Military Task Force (JMTF) in the Lake Chad region that decimated these insurgents.

Mr Tinubu’s focus is the West, and the benefits of this relationship are difficult to calibrate for now, as they have been few and far between historically. The frequent diplomatic voyages and then non-appointment/re-posting of ambassadors and high commissioners to our 109 foreign missions since they were recalled in October 2023 are incomprehensible. Experts believe that the situation is denting Nigeria’s image in diplomatic circles.

READ ALSO: Midterm Review: How Nigeria’s agriculture sector fared in two years of Tinubu’s leadership

It is our view that while the president’s Renewed Hope Agenda might have sought to reinvent hope and invigorate the national promise, yet it requires a radical tweak to guarantee the sacrosanct provisions of Section 14 (2) (b) of the 1999 Constitution as amended, which states that the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.

Minimally, the raft of policies unfolded ahead of the 29 May event – the “Nigeria first policy”, which frowns at reckless dependency on imported goods in the midst of local alternatives; revalidation of the conditional cash transfers; FEC approval of Medipool to reduce cost of drugs, a directive to the military to forge new strategies in dealing with insurgency, and the establishment of the forest guards speak to these imperatives.

ASUU is threatening to resume its strike over the Federal Government’s failure to fulfil its obligations under the 2009 agreement. The president has created 22 new universities when existing ones are grossly underfunded.

The latest concern in the political space is the defection of opposition figures to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and Mr Tinubu’s early endorsement for the 2027 election. As we noted in an earlier editorial, these are distractions to governance. A democracy that allows for a weak or dismantled opposition is essentially one contrived by voodoo. The renewal of hope in a polity should not constrain the conditions that make political choice possible. Otherwise, this will trigger and entrench fascism.