Former Minister for Youth Development and Sports, Bolaji Abdullahi, shares his thoughts with DANIEL AYANTOYE on the government’s fight against corruption, the PDP’s poor run in the 2023 election, among other issues
Nigerians have been going through tough times after the removal of fuel subsidy. Prices of goods and services have also gone up. What is the way out for Nigerians?
There are two dimensions to the issue of petrol subsidy. One is the principle of the subsidy itself while the other is the issue of corruption that has killed the implementation of subsidy over the years. Both have constituted a challenge to the economic managers. The question is whether the Nigerian economy can continue to carry the heavy burden of that subsidy in the face of competing national priorities like education and healthcare infrastructure. Yes, subsidy may have been easy to implement over the years when Nigeria had a population of 40 to 50 million. That was when the country did not have the kind of challenges it is faced with today.
So, the issue is either to remove it over a while or do it once. In any case, there’s no option that you adopt that is not going to bring some pain to the people because they have been depending on it for some time. For instance, when a nursing mother stops a child from breastfeeding, it can be a traumatising period for such a child. Meanwhile, there is no debating the fact that the implementation of subsidy has been mild in corruption but without prejudice to that, I think it’s something that needs to be removed.
The other aspect was the issue of the difficulty that came with the removal. I think the government is aware that there’s no way you can do this without bringing difficulties to the people which is why they introduced palliatives. But there is also the question of whether the palliatives have been targeted at the people who needed it. Have the palliatives been implemented efficiently and effectively? So, I think more work, needs to be done in that regard.
There have been reported cases of government officials diverting palliatives. Don’t you think there is a need for a measure to be put in place to forestall such embarrassment?
It is easy for us to say this. I have been in government, and I know that you can have the best of intentions, and design very good policies and programmes, but when it gets to the delivery or the implementation stage, the people we call the street-level managers are the people who are handling the implementation. They are the people who will come in contact with the targeted population. They can decide to do something completely different. The important point here is whether there is enough feedback mechanism in which the people entrusted with the responsibility of delivering this to the people can let the government know that the approaches taken have not delivered the optimum outcome expected.
If it not working, there is nothing wrong with saying, we got that wrong and we need to start all over. The important thing is how we work with the most efficient way to deliver these palliatives to the people to ensure that those who need them get them. The level of corruption in this country today is so terrible and everybody knows that. Everything you do, you need to watch it because there are all kinds of self-interests, but it did not start today and is not peculiar to Nigeria. Look at the issue of COVID-19; you can see how people played all kinds of games with COVID-19 intervention across the world. While you are busy designing that nice initiative, be aware that there are also people planning on how to enrich themselves with whatever you are doing. I think the most important thing is whether the accountability system or the feedback mechanism is robust enough to send the right signals to the operator that the process adopted is not delivering the maximum result.
Do you think Nigeria can be corruption-free?
First, we need to understand what corruption is. It is taking advantage of public resources for personal gain, and it is a natural human instinct to want to take things to personal advantage. The most important thing is not whether people tend to be corrupt or not, it is whether there are strong institutions that can deter people from doing illegal things. And that is about fighting crime. When you convert public assets illegally for your benefit, you have committed a crime under the Nigerian Constitution. I think the problem is whether enough people are being punished enough for this crime to serve as a deterrent to others who want to go in this same direction. So, it is not about preaching to people. There is enough law against corruption in Nigeria, but the question is whether the system and institutions put in place are robust enough to make the people shun corruption.
People should begin to ask questions. Someone just elected to office, and within a few months, he starts building mansions, buying cars, and making fat donations to churches and mosques. Before you know it, people start inviting him as chief launcher. You see everyone with a problem starts to go to him. Suddenly he is generous and being celebrated. They start giving him chieftaincy titles. People have to realise that stolen funds are not owned by the government but by them (the people). And this act is affecting everything. Look at the electoral system. It just appeared to me that the only credential you need to win an election in Nigeria is money. This money is obtained from illicit activities. We have to address this issue at the institutional, cultural, and religious levels if we want it to be a thing of the past.
So, how would you describe the level of the anti-corruption fight of the previous governments since the beginning of the Fourth Republic?
The fact that we are still having this discussion means that whatever approaches had been taken in the past have not delivered the type of results that we wanted them to. Again, we should commend former President Olusegun Obasanjo for setting up those institutions, but we also know that after some time, these institutions tend to get involved in the politics of power. So, I doubt if we can say so far, so good. I doubt if we can say we have made remarkable progress in the anti-corruption journey that started in 1999. At some point, it looked like the battle was getting somewhere but later, everything appeared to have disappeared and people became braver and understood better how to work around the system and the capacity of these institutions to deal with these issues is becoming weakened over the years.
With the recent presentation of the budget by President Bola Tinubu, do you think the government has an immediate solution to Nigeria’s problem?
The budget is an indication of what the government has to do. But President Bola Tinubu was sworn in May; we still need to give him sufficient time. This is someone who has always been President. Yes, the initial decision that he had to take was very hard, but I believe we need to give sufficient time to the people we have elected, including the senators, House of Representatives members, governors, and others. I don’t think it is fair to determine their performance within seven months. Though I have not had time to look at the details of the budget, the important thing is the effectiveness of its implementation. The budget showed there are deficits. This implies that the government will be involved in more borrowing. You can see that there is a structural quagmire that has been carried over the years. What the government needs to do is bring in people who are experts in this kind of situation.
This country is blessed with such people. It may not be people in government. We have people in the Diaspora and the private sector. Bring in anybody who has very important conditions in dealing with the economic situation of this country. The economic situation is very serious. The budget indicates that the government is aware that we are in a very serious situation. So, the question is how we go about implementing the budget and ensuring that the expectations of the people are met because the people have hopes, and incidentally, that is why the budget was tagged as the budget of renewed hope. So, what matters in the end is how to ensure that the hopes of the people are not dashed.
Nigeria’s economy is overburdened with borrowing. How can the government at the federal and state levels reduce the penchant for borrowing in order not to plunge the nation into further debt?
I am not an economist but what I know is that borrowing is not a problem. No country in the world will see an opportunity to borrow and turn it down. But the most important thing is the reason you are borrowing the money. Is it to invest in a productive venture? I’m glad you are not talking about the Federal Government alone, but also the states. I think the states’ merchant of borrowing sometimes needs to be looked at. The fact that the money is there to be borrowed does not mean it should be borrowed. There are some states where you have the impression that the government is just borrowing the money because it is there. If you borrow money that the next generation is going to pay, such as borrowing money with a 20 or 30-year payment period, you must invest that money in what that generation will benefit from. For instance, if you borrow to construct a road, university, or hospital, future generations will benefit from that investment which you borrowed for. But if you borrow money and consume it, the future generation will pay but they won’t benefit from it. So, engaging in such borrowing is wrong and immoral.
Today, the minimum wage cannot help workers meet their needs because of the rise in the prices of essential and other commodities. What do you suggest the minimum wage for workers should be?
I cannot say the specific amount that will be sufficient for workers. Some time ago, we were talking about N33,000. In the current Nigeria like you said, what can you do with such an amount? A worker who has a wife and children will pay for school fees and provide food and shelter for the family, what will such an amount do? Meanwhile, we are focusing too much on the money and not particularly what the money is used for. Money itself has no meaning; it is what it can buy that is important. If someone is sick and you give money, it does not cure him, but the money will be used to buy healthcare. If you want your child to be educated, you don’t give the child money, but you will use it to procure a good education. So, the question is: what is needed to ensure the workers live a decent life?
What do people spend money on that takes away what they earn before the end of the month? That is food, clothes, transportation, education, and medical care. In a country where the public transport system is efficient, you don’t need to put your car on the road; where basic primary education is of high quality, you don’t need to pay for nursery and primary education; where there is good insurance for basic healthcare, you don’t need to pay for medical care, and where you have a good housing scheme, you don’t spend money building a house and paying so much on rent. No matter how much minimum wage you pay, it can only have meaning when it is done alongside all other things that the money is spent on.
When someone starts working, the family in a few months will start calling on him to buy a car and build a house. These things that they call indicators of progress are indications of our backwardness. So, imagine if a parent does not have to pay for some of the basic education, then you can say that if you give the worker N30,000, N40,000, or N50,000, he knows that basic education, healthcare, and transportation will not take it from him or her. Then he can use the money to live a better life. But at the moment, no matter how much you pay, all these things will take that money from him. That is why we must look at minimum wage beyond the context of substance paid but we must look at it from the context of other things we need to put in place to make the worker enjoy the benefit of his labour.
Recently, criticism trailed the huge number of Nigerian delegates that attended the recent climate conference tagged COP28, and some saw the act as another way of wasting scarce resources. What lessons should the Nigerian government learn from such criticism?
I think the government needs to communicate more. I don’t think some Nigerians understand what attendance at the COP28 was or what the representation meant and what it required. If you had gone with 10, 20, and 30 people, what does it mean? Do we know what it means to be actively represented in a forum like that? I doubt many people commenting do. The government came out to say they didn’t take 1,411 to the event but went with around 400 people. Some people will still ask what they are doing with 400 people because they don’t understand. When I was the Minister of Sports, we took a contingent to an international sports competition with 100 people. People raised the alarm, asking us why since it was only 22 people who would play football. I said, apart from the people that you carry along as athletes, you need the medical team, physiotherapy team, and others. I don’t know the particular nature of COP28 that required several people. Nevertheless, I do think that the government needs to communicate more with Nigerians.
As a former Minister of Sports and Youth Development, how will you describe the rate at which youths leave Nigeria for other countries for greener pastures?
I don’t have any problem with young people leaving the country for greener pastures. It is not a bad thing that young people are migrating. If you go to the United Arab Emirates, you will notice that almost every canteen there is being run by Pakistani or Bangladeshi. In the Philippines, a few percentages that go into their economy come from employees’ repatriation. Hardly will you enter any hospital in America without finding an Indian. What we have in abundance in Nigeria are human beings. If we make the right investment in our people, there is nothing wrong with exporting teachers to China. That is if we have enough people to export. The only challenge there is if this export is affecting critical sectors like healthcare as it is happening now. But I think in terms of people trying to find opportunities out there, government should encourage them to go. We should design it as a programme to allow people to go and work in those countries. They will send money back home because Nigerians like their country and they have families here. If we can do this, it will be good for Nigeria’s economy.
There have been concerns about the poor management of sports in Nigeria. What emergency measures can be put in place to bring our sports back to where it used to be or even go beyond that level?
As someone who has been in that field, there are no easy results in sports. We keep looking for a quick solution, but there is no quick route. When you see a country win an international sports competition, you are talking about 10 years of work. To produce an Olympic medalist doesn’t just happen overnight. It takes years of investment, investing a lot of money in developing the athletes, giving them the right nutrition, the right medical care, and the right coaches at different levels. It takes years of hard work to produce an Olympic champion. That is why the Olympics people can produce the medals table with a degree of accuracy because they know the ranking of these athletes in different sports all over the world.
The idea of the game is to discover talent among young Nigerians between the ages of 11 and 12. We tried to develop a high-performance system where athletes who can perform very well are identified and enrolled in the national high-performance system. The system was to give them scholarships and probably send them abroad to develop their skills so that they could become elite athletes in a matter of years. But we have not been able to do that. Nigerians want to see quick results with medals as if a medal is just something you just go and buy off the market. The sports administration system needs to change.
The Peoples Democratic Party lost at the Supreme Court after challenging the election of President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress. What went wrong with your party this time?
I think the party over time lost its steam. The party dominated for so long with no real challenger before. Remember there was a time when a former chairman of the party, Chief Vincent Ogbulafor, said the PDP would rule for 60 years. At the time he was saying this, the PDP was so dominant that Nigeria was almost a one-party state. And because it was so dominant that it was the only channel to power, the internal competition, striving, and rivalry for party candidacy became so intense. Even those who were disgruntled and could not go to other parties had to stay in to cause trouble.
The PDP suffered internal contradiction for several years and it became weakened from within and at its weakest stage, the APC coalition came and upset us. Don’t forget that this is a party that was designed to be in power. The PDP was never designed to be an opposition party and that is why being in opposition for so long makes PDP look like it is gasping for air. What also held the party together was the candidacy of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, as some believed that if we were able to win the 2023 election, it would be our rollback to power, but that didn’t happen. So, after the election, everybody is now picking the pieces and wondering what next to do.
Atiku Abubakar recently called for an alliance with other political parties to defeat the APC in 2027. Does that mean the PDP cannot defeat the APC in 2027 without joining other political parties?
Before the APC came, no one ever was sure that any of such a coalition was going to work in Nigeria. The APC has shown that. When people are calling for alliance, it does not necessarily mean it is because they are weak. But because they think such will put them in a better position to be rolled to power. Whether that will lead to the expected outcome is a different thing. Why APC was successful was that, though there were people who were also interested in becoming president, they appeared to have agreed that former President Muhammadu Buhari would lead the party from the beginning. So, whether any coalition will work or not will depend on the capacity of various actors to agree on who the leader will be.
As a former commissioner for Education in Kwara State, what is your take on the issue of autonomy for public universities? Do you think these universities can survive if they get full autonomy?
They can survive but you have to also define what you mean by autonomy. Technically, university lecturers are staff of the Federal Government, but they should be staff of their various universities and that way, you will have a way to negotiate with individual lecturers. A lecturer at the University of Ilorin does not need to earn the same salary as a lecturer at the University of Sokoto and others. At the moment, I think there is too much uniformity and centralisation. There should be decentralization so that each university can be able to determine its character and culture. They (federal universities) should become self-governed institutions and of course, subjected to specific pre-determined higher regulations on tertiary institutions generally.
The responsibility of the government then will go into funding. How? The Federal Government will have to focus its money on funding the students rather than funding the universities. For instance, if you are studying Biology, it will cost N500,000 yearly. The Federal Government will fund you rather than the university. The government can determine that instead of funding you 100 per cent, they are going to fund you 70 per cent. For the remaining 30 per cent, you can go for the student loan or pay it yourself, but the university will get its N500,000 because you are a student there.
Your party leader and the former Senate President, Senator Bukola Saraki, lost Kwara State in 2019 and 2023. How certain are you that your party will reclaim the state in the next election?
The year, 2027, is still far away, and as I said earlier, a lot of work needs to be done whether at the state or national levels. A lot of things need to happen to reorganise the party and put it in a position where it can contest for power in 2027. But at the moment, I think the situation is not looking very good.
