High Chief Adegboyega Adejumo is a titled chief in Ibadanland. He is also a member of the executive committee of the pan-Yoruba socio-cultural organisation, Afenifere. In this interview with OLAOLU OLADIPO, he spoke on many issues relating to the two-month old government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

To him, the new government hasn’t demonstrated preparedness for governance and should show the right example if it must get the buy-in of the people to its programmes and policies, particularly the issue of fuel subsidy removal which is causing untold hardship to Nigerians. Excerpts:

You are a chieftain of the pan-Yoruba socio-cultural group, Afenifere…

(Cuts in) Let me correct you, Afenifere is not a socio-cultural group, it is a political party. In fact, if you can call it a socio-political organisation, I will accept it, but Afenifere from the beginning has always been a political group even though we have not been registered. I just need to clarify this….

You are a notable supporter of the Presidential Candidate of the Labour Party, Mr. Peter Obi…

(Cuts in) That is very true.

Now that the candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), President Bola Tinubu, eventually won the election; two months into his Presidency, would you say that your support for Peter Obi at the poll is well justified or vindicated?

Don’t forget that there is a process that is ongoing. That is the legal proceedings that have come out of the election by those who believe that the elections were neither free nor fair. Those who believe that they actually won the election are not the candidate of the APC and of course until such a process is concluded one way or the other, we will still have to believe that the process is inconclusive. That is the position of Afenifere. That is also the position of my principal, Mr. Peter Obi.

What have you seen of the situation since the government came on board?

This is a very pertinent question. I have said it somewhere that Afenifere has never been an organisation that is about service to self, rather it has always been about service to others. What I mean is that we think about the people, the antecedence of our leader, Papa (Obafemi) Awolowo, in all the 16 books that he wrote and in all the doctrines that he imparted on us that I follow well to this day and till the end of the world, all that we know is egalitarianism.

Afenifere is all about equity, it’s about justice. We strive and work towards good governance. We are not giving to having people whose desire is to have political ambition that they want to rule but then they lack plans to back such ambition up. Papa Awolowo would have calculated to the last Kobo how much Nigeria was losing through payment of subsidy or any other wastages. He would have calculated to the last Kobo, how much is being wasted on the refineries that are not working.

We have done exactly that just like Papa Awolowo did in his lifetime. For instance, there is this Oronsaye Report, which is one of the documents that we submitted in 2014 but if the government of the day had listened to us, we wouldn’t have found ourselves where we are. We are where we are because of lack of planning and if you have a lifelong ambition to become the president that is between you and your selfish interest.

If all that you have been doing is just like Papa Awolowo said, the trouble in Nigeria is that while some people are sleeping about with women, he is looking for solutions to the problems of Nigeria. We as an organisation have been busy looking for solutions to the problems plaguing the country but others are not. There is so much wastage in the system. The Oronsaye Report stated that there are 44 ministries which he said must be compressed to 20.

One would have believed that somebody who wants to be President should have known that it is pertinent to curb serious waste in the system. Would that not have been the first thing you would have done after coming into power? Even a bad policy, we have not seen from these people. They have not been able to sit down to plan or formulate any policy for governance.

Really!

Yes! Even the N8,000 palliative policy is the policy of former President Muhammadu Buhari. The question to ask is what has he done differently since he came to power? We are asking what plans he has brought to us? In terms of Hope, when they say Renewed Hope, what does it mean?

It is actually renewed suffering. So, in the last two months, we have been justified in the choice of the person that we interrogated, that talked about the wastages, talked about the systems, which he called the evil system that we must dismantled where so much money is pumped into moribund assets. I mean the refineries where so much is being spent on turn around maintenance and in the end, not a drop of petrol is being refined. Now petrol is N670 per litre.

But President Tinubu had said that he was going to remove subsidies during his campaign…

Let me put it this way, the Constitution is very clear that the most important work or job of a government is the welfare and protection of lives and property of the citizenry, this includes the economy of the people. Everyone knows that there is always a subsidy made by governments across the world for one item or the other. In America, the government there pays subsidies in about four or five ventures.

There is a subsidy on health, on agriculture and some other things. The fact is, even if you want to remove subsidies from petroleum products, that is not the way to do it. The American government paid its citizens some money to reflate the economy. What they have done is to destroy the economy and not to reflate it. The question is, what is the government going to make out of people who don’t earn more than N30, 000 monthly?

How are they going to survive? What about small businesses that rely on energy to drive their businesses? Even if you are going to remove subsidy payment, there is a way to do it. You have to do it in phases and stages. You don’t do something in a very shocking manner. You carried out the removal of subsidy and then you tampered with the value of the Naira. These policies mean that government is asking Nigerians to commit suicide.

The economy of Nigeria is so ‘Dollarised’ everything we do commercially is carried out in Dollar. In the end, Nigerians don’t have any eco- nomic power to sustain their existence any longer. The purchasing power of Nigerians has been grossly reduced by these actions of the government. What can the average Nigerian claim to be able to buy today in the market?

But the government is urging Nigerians to exercise some patience with it and that things will become okay soon…

(Cuts in) I don’t kid myself any lon- ger, I’m in my sixties. What patience are they looking for again? Right from 1976, every government in Nigeria has been asking us to be patient with it for one economic policy or the other. That is the truth, this has been the case since 1976. Have things been better? Is it now that things will be better? The problem is the President should know that Abuja is not like Lagos.

The fact that Lagos economy is developed and booming does not mean that the same scenario exists across the country. I have friends all across the Federation. Many of them from the North are complaining about the economic hardships. Many of them that I have spoken with said the situation has never been this bad for them in the North. Somebody even told me that he couldn’t go to work because he didn’t have fuel in his car and he cannot trek to work.

So, what assurances can anyone give but if there is going to be any form of assurance, it would be in the way and manner that you go about removing the subsidy, which should have been gradual like a plan that will span over a period of six months. Again, they are talking about palliative which ought to have come with the removal immediately in the first plac

They ought to have factored that into the policy, how the removal would have impacted on the people. The question now is, is it now that the children are dead that you will now be buying Panadol?

In specific terms, if you are to meet the president, what kind of suggestion are you going to give him with regards to the way forward?

There was this presidential debate between the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo and the late President Shehu Shagari. Papa Awolowo was saying to Shagari that free education was possible and late President Shagari said no that it wasn’t possible, saying money wasn’t available to do it. Awolowo asked the late President how much he felt it would cost for the policy to be implemented. The figure was about N6 million at that time and he told him that if wastage was cut in the government, it was possible.

He told Shagari that the government spent N3 million on newspapers and another N3 million on refreshments to add up to N6 million. Shagari now asked further, how Papa was going to source for the remainder. Papa told him that ‘you are the one aspiring for leadership, I have given you a clue on how to raise N6 million which is two-thirds of the job, you should go and look for the rest. What I will tell this president if I see him is, to plug leakages and wastages that are abundant in the government.

It is everywhere. For instance, the National Assembly is asking for N70 billion which is humongous. He needs to reduce the ministries and agencies. I will tell him to let the people see that those in government are making serious efforts at belt tightening. I mean those in government should not be seen as living ostentatious lifestyles while the people are wallowing in poverty. I am also going to tell him to be ingenious in his approach to governance.

He needs to surprise Nigerians and not this one that he will be moving in a 200-vehicle convoy like what we saw when he came to Lagos the other time. He needs to reduce the number of aides. He needs to tell us all that he has saved from all these measures too.”