By Mike Odiakose, Abuja

Former presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Prince Adewole Adebayo, has scored President Bola Tinubu’s economic team low, saying they are “uncoordinated.”

Adebayo also came down hard on the Minister of Finance for saying that the economy was doing good amidst heavy external borrowing.

Adebayo told an online newspaper in an interview that the President Tinubu government is suffering from economic illiteracy.

He said, “I always wish there will be a good day for Nigeria, but it is not a good day when the finance minister believes the day he goes borrowing in London is a good day.

“How can it be a good day when Nigeria goes overseas to give investments in the capital market from the excess production that we have? 

“No minister that we had in the past would say the day we went borrowing was a good day.

When told that even advanced countries like America also borrow, he had this to say: “America borrows from within. You borrow from your own currency. I am not quarreling with them borrowing from the currency they issued. 

“When you are borrowing Euro bonds, borrowing currency from other people in other capitals of the world, it’s a sign of crisis.

“Yes, you can do it but you don’t say it’s a good day for you. If you are anaemic and your neighbour comes to donate blood to you, you should be grateful but you don’t say that’s the best day of your life, because you are not supposed to be anaemic in the first place.

“They need to run the economy in such a way that we can generate capital for ourselves. 

“Fundamentally, I think they are uncoordinated. Even though he is supposed to be the coordinator of the economy, he is not coordinated.

“The thinking isn’t coordinated but if they coordinate well and work with us as a population, we should be able to generate wealth for the country.

“The parameters are a bit basic and elementary. Even in those basic elementary parameters, they are not sincere about them. They don’t want to meet them because they are not realistic,” Adebayo said. 

“The exchange rate they fixed is unrealistic.

“Given the other measures they have taken, I think it is the lack of coordination that concerns me. I wish that Tinubu’s 2025 budget works.

“I want them to succeed. I want investors to come to Nigeria. I plead with anyone to have confidence in the economy of Nigeria. That is my desire, even though I am in the opposition. 

“However, they are self contradictory as these contradictions would at the end of the day prove themselves.

“For example, in their mind, if they are able to succeed, they are working towards 15 percent inflation, but any basic micro-economist knows that you must never have double digit inflation.

“It is one thing to have a high BP, and the doctor tells you he will only give you medium BP; the doctor wants to kill you because his job is to return your BP to normal. The objective they set, even if they succeed, is a failure on its own,” he further stated.

He noted that, “I saw the minister and I heard him and I understood his philosophy. I am not against him in person. I like him as a finance person who can manage your assets, like a merchant banker.

“There are two things you need to do with the type of our size of development. First is the fiscal and budgetary housekeeping. The government budgets for itself in the first part of the budget.

“Then, the second part of the budget signals to the rest of the economy and creates a stimulus for areas they want to emphasize, and then uses other incentives to encourage others to do investments. They are sending wrong signals.

“First, in their own housekeeping, they are wrong in the way they are going about it. You can never say to anybody, especially somebody that understands basic microeconomics that your inflation rates cannot be lower than your unemployment rate. You can do it.

“You have already got it upside down. If you have a 15 percent inflation rate, definitely, your unemployment cannot go below 15 percent because of the way you run the economy.

If you listen to the gentleman again, he painstakingly celebrated the idea that they have 25 million households that they are trying to give little money to.

“Why don’t you have 25 million households from whom you are going to give employment? 

So, you have a social register for people you want to give money but you don’t have a register of unemployed people that you can give jobs to. What sense does it make?

“The idea that you are going to imagine manufacturing by thinking that if you give N50,000 to any enterprise, whether small, medium or micro, is invisible; N50,000? If the person comes to your office to collect the money, he will spend about that on transportation.

“If you say you want to grow the economy by bringing investors, don’t you understand that borrowing money in the bank is just one of the factors of production?

“Loan capital, for example, won’t you realize that there are other paper expenditures like labour cost, infrastructure cost, and other costs. If you are driving those costs above sustainability, there is no way you can generate employment or capital in the economy.”

Responding to questions on INEC chairman’s claim of Ghana learning from Nigeria he said: “Yes, they took a lot of lessons not to be like Nigeria. That is what it can mean logically because the INEC chairman is a professor; he must be speaking in some sound way because what Ghana has done is exactly the opposite of what we did.

“They tried to make their own credible. We tried to make ours not credible even though we invested more in terms of technology, and quality of manpower.

“You don’t go to other countries and find professor emeritus, dean of faculties, and vice chancellors coming to be returning officers,” Adebayo added.

On the push for rotational presidency, the ex-presidential candidate said, “Rotation is at two levels. You must rotate according to the geopolitical zone for peace to reign among the elite. But you must rotate from the elite to the people for growth and justice to happen in Nigeria.

“If you are rotating from North to South and all of that and rotating about the same wasteful elite who have no idea, you will be rotating poverty, insecurity and others.

“But if you rotate inter generationally from the old people to the young ones and ideologically from those who follow the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-World Bank to those who have indigenous ideas, authentic and pro Nigeria ideas, you would have some progress for the country.”