Even if you don’t read my comments, please watch this: https://youtu.be/s9S8DAXo13I?si=noduCi8CZMctN1kR, Sunday evening for me is often to chill out. However, watching got me off the couch to pen this.
In September 2022, a childhood friend was visiting, and I took him to watch one of the early matches of the season at the Arsenal stadium. As we travelled down on the Tube, I asked him about Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s political ambition. I told him I was worried that one of the two likely candidates to win was surrounded by so many rumours of cognitive impairment.
He assured me that everything I was reading was false. He told me that the last time he had a face-to-face conversation with the President-to-be was more than two years earlier, and that their conversation had lasted several hours.
Yesterday, I called my friend to catch up, and he reminded me of the conversation we had just under four years ago. He then alerted me to a YouTube video, which I watched.
My friend and I do not always agree on minute details, but our friendship has lasted decades. There are aspects of BAT’s programme that both of us agree need to improve, and there are aspects on which we disagree. Where both of us agree is on the intellectual capacity of Bola Ahmed Tinubu. I have neither seen nor read anything from the rest of the field that suggests anybody comes anywhere close.
Tinubu is probably the most physically frail among the top contenders. However, when it comes to intellectual capacity, he is probably the strongest.
There are facts that cannot be contested. Nigeria had a revenue problem in the last term of Buhari’s government. We all knew that close to 100% of our revenue was going towards servicing debt. This was public knowledge. Buhari also did not allocate any money for oil subsidies in his last budget because Nigeria did not have any. Bola Tinubu has addressed this. It is easy to compare now to the previous years. What is harder is to try and imagine what Nigeria will be like if it continued to spend 100% of her resources on servicing debt as in the latter Buhari years.
If you watch this video carefully, you will see that Tinubu has spent time thinking about what he is doing. There is a philosophy behind it, a method to what felt like madness at different times.
I focus on the empirical, and I was a critic of Tinubu from the second half of 2023 and well into 2024, when the data coming from the outcome of his naira policies was worrying.
My criticisms were twofold. First, the data showed that the gap between the black-market and official exchange rates was as wide as it had been before subsidies were removed. Second, the naira was swinging wildly, leading me to infer that the government was probably injecting forex into the market.
Over time, those two problems were resolved. And I stopped inflicting my charts on those who bothered to read my page.
Of course, Tinubu still has a lot more problems to solve. His changes, lauded by financial and economic institutions around the world, need to be felt by Nigerians.
My final comment goes to his rivals. I want them to watch this video. They need to articulate their alternative with a similar level of intellectual clarity and detail. Their philosophy also needs to be as clear as his. That will help Nigerians make better choices.
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