LAST week the presidency said in a statement that Nigeria’s president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, would be travelling to the People’s Republic of China in the first week of September. Unless something has changed in our comprehension of the English language, the first week of September will ordinarily mean between Sunday, September 1 to Saturday, September 7. For a fractured presidency this understanding does not apply. Now let’s quote aspects of that statement issued by his media adviser, Chief Ajuri Ngalela.
“His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, will depart for the People’s Republic of China, most specifically, Beijing, from nation’s capital (Abuja) within the first week of September, to engage in a series of meetings and activities with immediate and future benefit to the Nigerian economy and the Nigerian people”. However, 48 hours before the start of the first week of September, the president hopped into his jet, in the ‘nation’s capital’, and left the country.
So, as you read this, Tinubu is reportedly already in China meeting with his counterpart, President Xi Jinping, or visiting big corporations in that Asian country, or interacting with the chief executive officers of companies that boast trillions of dollars in assets. Unlike my wife, I have not been to China, but stories abound that China is, in some respects like New Zealand – a world away. But the import in the conflict in the presidency’s statement and the early departure without further clarification is that the disdain of Tinubu for Nigerians extends to those who directly work for him. It could also be that he chose to leave early so as to savour his new but old (pre-used) super luxurious N250 billion widebody A330 Airbus presidential jet.
I concede that it will not be uncharitable for any reader to read mischief into the monetary value I have, on my own, assigned to the ‘new’ presidential bird. For a start there was no proper and conventional appropriation and provisioning for the Airbus jet acquisition in the 2024 national budget. It was just bought so that our president will not die in an aircraft crash given that the Boeing Business Jet (BBJ) in the presidential fleet, 19 years old, had become unserviceable and prone to annoying downtimes which embarrass the president and the country in foreign lands. The $150 million USD purchase price for the Airbus was a product of conjecture by the media. It is the same for the $50 million allocated to retrofit and upscale the jet to fit the status of a feudal president. Depending on who you ask, we have between eight to 10 aircraft and choppers in the presidential fleet of a poor country led by a poor president who soaks garri and eats groundnuts for lunch according to Vice President Kashim Shettima. This diet inside a presidential jet will be a spectacle worth beholding.
As usual the president and the regime he heads do not deem it fit and proper to account to Nigerians on how they came about the aircraft; where it was sourced from; when; and, for how much? All Nigerians were told, and grudgingly so, by a low-level presidential staff on the social media, was that the aircraft was snapped up during an auction, and paid for through a now veritable slush fund called service wide vote. The service wide vote can be likened to the notorious security vote, a channel through which heads in the executive arms of government use to steal money from the public till. The notoriety of the abuse of this budgetary provision was unearthed in a research paper published in 2019.
The research work conducted by Messrs William Smart Ekong, Sunday Effiong, Charles Effiong, and, John Ogenyi Oboh under the title ‘Use of Service -Wide Vote (Contingency Budget) for National Development: Evidence from Federal Ministries, Departments And Agencies in Nigeria’ revealed that government ministries and agencies, and even the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) abused the service wide vote “to the tune of over N4.17 trillion between 2004 and 2018 due to non-compliance with rules governing the use of the vote”. The researchers, after observing that the abuse had stunted and blunted national developmental objectives of the vote, proceeded to make recommendations to help police the vote including allocation of 5% of the annual budget to service -wide-vote, regular replenishment of releases from the vote, obtaining approval from the National Assembly before releasing funds from the vote, roll over of unspent funds, prosecution of corrupt MDA officials, and avoiding those sharp practices that “will make the use of the service-wide-vote ineffective in achieving national developmental objectives”.
Two things confront us in the findings and recommendations of these researchers, two of whom were said to be of the University of Calabar in Cross River state. First, there’s no evidence yet that the five-year-old study which was published in the Research Journal of Finance and Accounting 10(10): 45-62 found favour with Nigeria’s rulers. Secondly, the scholars may not have envisaged that this country will be burdened with a National Assembly that is completely beholden to the executive arm of government. But it does not really matter because it is not beyond Tinubu and his cheerleaders to argue that the acquisition of a N250 billion jet in an opaque manner was one of the reasons for the creation of the service-wide-vote. This is what you get when a ruler is brazenly contemptuous of the people.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s population is currently put at anywhere between 200-250 million people. Since nobody knows the country’s population for sure, we are bound to rely on projections, conjectures and guess-estimates. About two years ago, Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) found that not less than 133 million people were dimensionally poor – food poor, health poor, education poor, housing/shelter poor, potable water poor, sanitation poor, etc. Since May last year many more Nigerians have dropped into the category of the dimensionally poor in the wake of the no brainer economic policy options of the extant regime, with the figure unofficially put at over 150 million citizens. Nigeria has consecutively remained the global capital of poverty since 2019 when it inherited the dubious tag from India. By the way, India is about six times the population of Nigeria. But Nigeria’s president moves around as an Emperor of a rich Gulf state with a N5 billion yacht, a N2 billion custom-made, armour-plated and bomb-resistant American Escalade Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV)- fit only for a monarch or for the leaders of the first world superpower countries such as the United States, Russia and China. The stark and painful difference is that these other leaders drive vehicles made in their countries. But Tinubu luxuriates in an Escalade made by Cadillac, the luxury division of General Motors, a jet manufactured in France, and a yacht of unknown origin.
Except for the yacht, none of the luxury acquisitions of the president has the regime found the need to tell Nigerians how much they cost the taxpayer. And this is because Tinubu has an abiding disdain for Nigerians. And other government officials have copied him. Why bother when there are no consequences for being contemptuous of Nigerians. At the weekend, one American economist reportedly said Tinubu was an insufferable and ignorant person. But I wager that Tinubu knows what he is doing. Steve Hanke is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. He described Tinubu as “arrogant, ignorant, and incompetent” for prioritising flamboyant lifestyle and luxury travel amid ongoing economic struggles in Nigeria, where according to him, inflation rates were reportedly as high as 114%. This is about three times the figure given by the NBS. He appeared to suggest that the NBS inflation rate was a product of fiction. The message is that the world is taking note of the choices of the ruler of an underdeveloped and debt-ridden third world country.
Tinubu’s supporters who are to be pitied are wont to point us to other countries where people, according to them, are going through struggles and a cost of living crisis. They also point to some luxuries enjoyed by such leaders. But not once would they acknowledge that no two situations are the same. They won’t tell us that global poverty has since taken permanent residency in our country. Let’s illustrate with one example what a sensitive leader who finds himself leading an economically challenged country will do.
Keir Starmer is the new UK prime minister. Last week he told Britons and others that his first budget due next month “is going to be painful”. He said that he had no other options but assured that only those with the broadest shoulders will “bear the heavier burden. Starmer said his choices were limited because his administration inherited a £22 billion black hole as well as a”societal black hole”. But before Starmer warned about the sacrifices he would call on the people to make, he first started with himself and the privileges of his own office as prime minister. He announced that a £40m VIP helicopter contract used extensively by his predecessor Rishi Sunak for local travels will not be renewed when it expires by the end of this year. He said it will be in keeping with his promise when he sought the vote of the people to undo “14 years of rot” and profligacy under the Conservatives. Starmer is of the Labour Party.
Sunak had used the government – funded helicopters on several occasions while he held sway, even when it was obvious train travel would have been almost as quick and convenient, and certainly cheaper for some of the expensive trips with the chopper. Starmer’s action could be derided as cheap populism but no leader, except in Nigeria, has a right to ask for understanding and sacrifices from the people while he immersed himself in sickening luxury. Signalling, that’s what Starmer has demonstrated. And to think that the UK belongs to the first world. But here, Tinubu whose country may not even qualify to be designated as a third world country lives in a fortress renovated with billions of naira before he moved in last year, glides in a N5 billion yacht, rides inside billions of naira worth of a foreign made SUV, and junkets around the world in a foreign manufactured presidential jet on the excuse of wooing foreign investors.
There’s no doubt that world leaders look at him with scorn, knowing that every of the luxury items he uses were shamelessly acquired with foreign loans. And some of these lending institutions are domiciled in the countries of those leaders where he goes to show off. Tinubu is like that arrogant king in the Igbo nation who struts about in the market square to impress people but did not realise that his royal gown was smeared with feaces. Who will tell Tinubu this truth? But will he listen?
*Incipient tyranny and unfolding imperial presidency will, other things being equal, form the concluding part of this trilogy next week.
