The story of Nigeria must change, and it must change for the better. It cannot be business as usual as PBAT did not leave anybody in doubt at the inception of his administration that there must be a paradigm shift from the old orders.
And to change things meaningfully, the approach must be conscious, deliberate and strategic. If one continues to do the same thing, the same way and expects to get a different result, the person must be crazy. To be meaningfully different is to be deliberately different.
This underscores the need why the tough decisions taken so far by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu must be given the benefits of the doubt. I know something for sure about politicians, they don’t like their image to be smeared. They can’t even afford to be unpopular because they know the consequences. It could jeopardize their chances in the next elections.
I’m cock sure that our President is conscious of this fact. Therefore, he cannot afford to sacrifice or squander his future electoral fortunes for reforms that will not benefit Nigerians. The harvest time is close by, and this must happen in the shortest foreseeable future.
Mr President has taken the lead by assuming the role of the Chief Marketing Officer of Nigeria. He is in a hurry to grow the economy and put Nigeria in the rightful position. He has travelled to the United Kingdom, France, India, United States, Saudi Arabia, Germany among others, repositioning Nigeria, and preaching the gospel that the country is prepared more than ever before to receive foreign investments with the assurance of mutual benefits.
He has been telling those who care to listen that the era of arbitrage is over. And good enough, his foreign hosts at various fora are giving in to his requests going by the feedbacks being received. In no distant future, Nigeria, no doubt, will begin to experience a boom in the inflow of foreign investments.
Only last week, the President came back from a working visit to Germany with a couple of mouth-watering deals signed with his German counterpart. Among the booties he brought are the restructuring of the Siemens Power Deal to ensure faster implementation, a gas supply deal signed between Nigeria and Germany with the first delivery set for 2026, and a 500m dollars Green Energy Project agreement that will see to the implementation of several renewable energy projects across Nigeria. This is just a tip of the iceberg!
At the home front, the President is not leaving any stone unturned. He has read the riot act to the Ministers. No room for excuses, indolence and underperformance. The deregulation of the oil sector is already yielding results with the commissioning of a 5,000bpd Waltersmith Modular Refinery situated in Imo State a couple of days ago.
The government’s assurance that the Port Harcourt Refinery will become operational by December still stands. That of Kaduna is billed to follow suit in the first quarter of 2024 according to reports. The much awaited multi billion dollars Dangote Refinery in Lagos will also commence operations in due course of time. This will definitely put a stop to fuel importation and reduce pressure on the demand for foreign exchange. In all of this, the forces of demand and supply, expectedly will force down the price of fuel, thereby giving reliefs to motorists.
In the power sector, the Minister in charge, Oloye Bayo Adelabu has also been up and doing, striving to change the narratives of the sector. He has vowed, on behalf of the Federal Government to achieve 20,000 megawatts of power generation in the next three years as against 4,000 megawatts which the country is still struggling to sustain.
In his quest to achieve this feat, the Minister has been engaging prospective partners in the value chains as well as synergizing with critical stakeholders in the power sector. Recently, he was on the entourage of PBAT to Germany. There he paid a courtesy visit to Siemens Energy’s Switchgear, Electrolyzer, and Gas Turbine Production factory in Berlin. He noted that the visit would help to facilitate improved projects and working relationship between the Federal Government and Siemens with a view to further energize the Presidential Power Initiative (PPI) which is targeted at solving the problems of power generation and power distribution across Nigeria.
Mention was also made of the 2019 deal signed with the German engineering firm to deliver 7,000MW of electricity to the national grid by 2021, and 11,000MW by 2023. With these agreements reactivated and reestablished this time around, one is hopeful that by 2026, delivering 20,000MW to the national grid as promised by the Honourable Minister will be a reality and not a mirage.
The appointment of Dr Olayemi Cardoso, the one Mr President used to call “headmaster” is not unexpected. It’s likely going to be on a roller coaster for the fortunes of the Central Bank of Nigeria to be recovered. Having criminally looted the treasury and bastardized the citadel of the nation’s monetary administration by the immediate past management, the new CBN governor has promised that his core mandate of regulating the monetary policy will not be mixed with politics as his predecessor did. The era of quasi-fiscal policies that dealt a heavy blow on the economy is over. It is also interesting to note that despite the initial fell of the Naira from N1000 to a dollar, tremendous success is being recorded on daily basis in the forex market thereby proving the pundits and some prophets of doom wrong. This naira shall be strong again!
On what may soon be probably blown into the open as “Emefiele gate”, the Special Investigation panel that looked into the activities of the CBN led by Jim Osayande Obazee did a digging deep job in the course of their assignment. While Nigerians eagerly await the official reports of the outcome of the investigations, feelers have it that mind boggling rots have already been uncovered by the special investigators. Some heads may likely roll at the end of the day. But please, do not tell anyone that I told you this because the EFCC are on standby, watching with the eagle’s eyes.
Nigerians in their characteristics of being hasty and judgemental are already on speculation spree, talking on who has returned what to the treasury of the Federal Government. They are already passing judgements at beer parlour joints and within the closets of their rooms. But the person for whom a wife is being brought doesn’t stretch his neck anxiously looking to see when she arrives. “Eniti a ngbe iyawo wa ba ki garun”. Nothing shall be swept under the carpet by the Federal Government, because as I used to say, it can’t be business as usual. Just let’s keep our fingers crossed.
To be continued.
B. Aderemi Ogundele
(Jagunmolu)
