Hitting the ground running: Priorities for Tinubu presidency

WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER

info@medaner.com, justme4justice@yahoo.com

The much awaited, heightened 2023 presidential election is over; the time for politicking is over. This is not to dismiss the usual election disputes that trail our elections since the birth of the Fourth Republic and thankfully, there are Constitutional and democratic processes and processing in place to address the peculiar matters. It is now time for Nigerians to get organised ahead for governance in the next political dispensation. It is time for all, individuals and groups, to begin to think of the way forward for Nigeria. It is the time to collectively contribute to the agendas that are desirable for the revamping of the Nigeria nation. It is time to set short and long term standards and goals that are achievable for our nation and our systems. In this piece, I hereby offer and project a number of policy priorities across critical sectors of the Nigeria system consecutively, until they are all covered. This is a clarion call and offer to all Nigerians, home and abroad, to review and enrich these priorities for the good of our commonwealth.
Nigeria is a nation that has no business struggling with real development and wealth of citizens. We are abundantly blessed across the board. Arable land that supports all season crops and ably capable of supporting food and cash crops to meet both local food requirement of the nation as well as substantial foreign exchange earner for the country. We are hugely blessed with water bodies across the country for all purposes that bring gains to the national economy and survival; the nation is blessed with natural resources of all kinds and of immense economic values. We are blessed with human resources; over 220 million citizens with varied capacities to contribute to national development and always readily available. Nigeria is so blessed that we have no reason to be nowhere near where we are today as a nation.
We have virtually abused all the God’s blessings of the nation ; we have abused the resources at our disposal, limiting the capacities of our population to both develop individually and collectively as a nation. A great and blessed country that has over the decades become a dumping ground of many products from foreign nations across the globe; grossly depending on imported products, and an oil producing nation that has become permanently plagued with fuel scarcity and exorbitant price burden due to product inability; and we have apparently lost the capacity to employ the strength of our teeming youth population.
Consequently, unemployment, poverty, insecurity, corruption, infrastructural deficiency and sectoral depreciation have become the lot of the nation and its populace. This is not to talk of the social and cultural implications of the mismanagement of national resources; the emanating inequalities that have resulted in divisions across ethnic, tribal and regional lines, and the religion-bred divisions that has made it impossible for the many units within the country to congregate to any agreement.
How do we get here? Simply, we have been consecutively unblessed with unprepared leaders; those who become leaders without preparation for leadership, and many who forcefully become leaders for the power and fame that come with leadership of a nation, especially a significant one like Nigeria. We have had presidents and heads of state that gambled with state administration and exited the stage without contributing substantially and meaningfully to the national system. Summarily, Nigeria’s problem has been leadership all through since independence. The time of gambling with leadership in the country is over for us; we cannot afford to rigmarole continuously about the same point of sub-economic, infrastructural and socio-cultural development.
Nigeria’s need at the moment is a functional leadership, a strong personality, ready and well prepared for leadership. Nigeria needs a figure with an illustrious antecedent in leadership and executive position over time; a man with recorded capacity to organise human resources for the administration of the abundant resources of the country. Nigeria needs a man who understands the intricacies of cultural, regional and religious differences among the Nigerian people and who is patriotic to the point of never taking sides; Nigeria needs a leader who understands the need for strategic infrastructural development across the country.
Personally, beyond the religious and tribal colouration of the 2023 presidential election, a factor that speaks more for the President-elect, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu is his antecedents in leadership position in and out of power. As a former governor of Lagos state, he has demonstrated the capacity to organise human resources beyond what we have seen elsewhere and from any other leader in Nigeria; he turned around the economic landscape of the state within a short period of time, changing the IGR of the state by as much as 8500 percent from N600 million per year to N51 billion per year in a space of eight years. He surmounted pressure from the Atlantic Ocean, overpower the sea and converted a section of it to a livable city; that audacity to look challenges in the face, confront it and overpower it is one leadership character we voted for in Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and look forward to see him manifest the same in his coming presidency over the next few years in Nigeria.
The expectations ahead are high; and the need to set desirable, broadly acceptable priorities and agenda for the incoming administration are sacrosanct. We want to see real changes in Nigerian governance; we want to see right and capable individuals occupying critical, sensitive positions across the board; we want to see appointments devoid of religious and tribal sentiments and colourations. Nigerians want to live the hopes they have had for decades; the hope of a Nigeria where economic prosperity, cultural prosperity, infrastructural prosperity and peace become real national manifestations.
And if Nigeria must return to the path of glory, we must altogether; I mean, all of us, across all boundaries must come together, agree together that we have a common problem and be ready to work together to solve our numerous problems
The process of solving a problem begins with the acceptance of the existence of the problem. Nigeria does have a number of problems; the social media is littered already with them; everyone is busy listing and counting the problems and even cursing with regard to the burden of these problems. We run the streets with anger at a myriad of problematic issues; we rarely remember that the problem would remain eternally with us unless we begin to proffer solutions to them.
So, where do we begin from? Our problems are many, multifaceted but it is also true that there is no problem without solution. An anonymous writer rightly said “when you find no solution to a problem, it’s probably not a problem to be solved, rather a truth to be accepted.”
I will begin with a take on agriculture and Nigeria’s failure over the years to come out better and great as a consequence of the total neglect of that very sensitive sector of the economy. We must all begin from the point of the realisation that every developed nation did not become developed until they first attained agricultural development, that is, as a functionality mature sector. Agricultural development comes first with food sufficiency which is the primary need of individuals and nations but it doesn’t end there; with food sufficiency comes excess that become raw materials for industries. When a nation maximally develops its agricultural sector, processing industries naturally spring up to process farm produce into finished product; jobs are created; crimes are minimal and people generally complain less.
Going into independence, the major contributors to Nigeria GDP and individual incomes; the major employer of labour; the major source of raw materials to several industries was agriculture. All the regions were self-sufficient with incomes generated from agricultural production and practices. The West, for instance, was the great cocoa producing region; the produce turned out in tons and the mighty Cocoa House in Ibadan completes the story. Hundreds of thousands of Westerners were doing really well. Today, we ask, what happens to Nigeria’s cocoa production? Where are the acres of cocoa plantations all over the Southwest? What becomes of the value chain of opportunities along the cocoa business? The jobs created and the prospect of the cocoa processing industry in Nigeria. Sadly, they are gone, down the drain.
The famous groundnut pyramid of yore in the North has become only a theoretical subject in Nigeria. Once, we pride ourselves as the largest producer of palm oil in the world but who are we now with regard to these produce? The Southern Nigeria that used to be the beacon of palm oil production does not remember how to plant and process palm oil any longer. The attention of everyone including the government has been off the sector; agricultural extension officers that were a common sight in all our villages do not exist any longer. We have lost so much abandoning the sector. Today we grapple with the burden of unemployment when a flourishing agricultural sector alone can employ over 40 percent of our population along all its value chain.
Nigeria, a country of over 200 million people and blessed with good arable soil that supports almost all tropical crops has suddenly become a zero producing but 100% food and drinks importing nation. We ignore our capacity to be self-sufficient in food production and still cater for almost all nations in our subregion and have become products dumping ground for other nations.
The list is endless. We import rubber tyres to the tune of $309 million annually while our rubber producing capacity lay wasted; Nigeria, once a palm oil giant, now has a palm oil import bill to the tune of $199 million yearly. We import raw sugar to the tune of $406 million yearly; we even import wheat that we can plant in the North to the tune of $1.09 billion yearly; needless to talk about fish, pork, beef and poultry importation. Between 1990 and 2011, record shows that we spent about N1.0 billion per day on imported food and drinks.
So, what is the way forward? What are the decisions that must be made? I think we must unanimously agree that we must at all cost attain sufficiency in basic food production, increase local processing of export crops, increase agricultural raw materials for industries, generate gainful employment through agriculture and grow to rationally utilise all our agricultural resources among others.
And how do we achieve these? We must know and agree that we can produce almost all the food we eat because we possess the capacity. We must all become serious, beginning from the government at all levels; we must identify all the food items we import; we must give a time frame for total stoppage of their importation; we must encourage and mobilise farmers to the farm.
We must make effective usage of graduates of departments and institutes of agriculture. The NYSC scheme should be restructured to annex the knowledge of these fresh manpower. Massive NYSC farm settlements should be established across the country and all corps members with bias in agriculture should be sent to the farms to produce food for the nation. These corps members should be engaged on mutually benefiting agreements that naturally retain them in the scheme.
Finally, every graduate willing to go to the farm must be fully supported by the government; I suggest a partnership that guarantees land availability, resources, market, storage, conversion and processing facilities. It must be a unanimous decision that the incoming administration must return Nigeria to the path of gross agricultural production for local consumption and industrialisation.
How do we do these? There must be direct government investment in the sector across levels of administrations but majorly at the federal level. If we want to get it right, a state of emergency ought to be declared in that very critical sector – agriculture. The multifaceted mandatory and mutually beneficial engagement would literally feed the nation, produce raw materials for many cottage industries, create jobs across many value chains, and reduce insecurity.
Another critical sector that must be attended to as a matter of emergency by the incoming administration is the nation’s education system. Our problem is not just about strikes; the sector needs total rehabilitation, from the curriculum, to the quality of teaching faculties, to financing, remuneration of teachers, lecturers and administrators. Our national education sector requires setting and religiously adhering to standards that comply with global education standards and turn out output that compete considerably on the global front. It is about time that we redesign the nation’s education system to turn out graduates who are on one hand employable, and on the other hand, able to stand on their own as entrepreneurs and inventors. We must critically look at the infrastructure that supports our schools, and the teaching structures; we must look at systemic corruption and malpractices that have taken over the national education system. We cannot have an effective and functional education system, where marks can be bought by whatever means. The incoming administration is already talking of a 25 percent budgetary allocation to education; we hope to see that becoming a reality, as it will be the much-needed intervention that the country needs and a response to the years-long hitherto cry from the sector. Addressing the fundamental challenges leading to recurrent strike actions and closing down of our institutions must be a priority, and of course, making true promises to establish a student loan administration system would be a catalyst to improved education efficiency in the country.

GOD BLESS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA!