TDThe recent publication by the current Director-General of the Budget Office, Tanimu Yakubu, regarding Mr. Peter Obi’s critique of the current administration’s foreign engagements provides a classic masterclass in academic deflection.
It is frankly appalling that an official charged with the nation’s fiscal direction chooses to prioritise partisan spin over the grim, undeniable reality of his own balance sheets.
By dismissing legitimate concerns about the efficacy of Nigeria’s current diplomatic economic strategy as ‘populist simplication’, the Kurfi-born economist attempts to insulate Chief Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration from the harsh lived realities of the Nigerian people.
Mr. Yakubu’s dismissive posture is a slap in the face to every Nigerian family presently struggling to put food on the table.
He is essentially telling the suffering masses that their agony is merely an intellectual inconvenience to his government’s narrative.
However, in doing so, he exposes the fundamental disconnect between the current economic management team and the citizenry.
The crux of Mr. Yakubu’s argument is that the government is engaged in a necessary, albeit painful, stabilisation process.
He posits that international diplomacy is the engine for rebuilding sovereign credibility.
While this sounds like textbook standard economics, it remains a hollow theory in the context of Nigeria’s current economic trajectory.
The primary contention is not whether Nigeria needs foreign investment.
It is the administration’s inability to demonstrate that its constant foreign forays are yielding any measurable dividends for the Nigerian economy.
When the leadership of a nation spends more time in the air than on the ground, the onus is on that leadership to produce a tangible documented Return on Investment, ROI.
Silence about the concrete results of these trips, beyond the signing of Memoranda of Understanding, is not a strategy; it is a failure of transparency.
Furthermore, the Katsina State-born economist’s attempt to paint PO’s critique as ‘intellectually inconsistent’ is a masterclass in gaslighting.
There is no contradiction in advocating for economic reform while simultaneously condemning the absence of a social safety net.
Economic stabilisation, as practiced by the APC administration under a man whose historical backgrounds are questionable, has been characterised by shock therapy that has effectively hollowed out the middle class and pushed the most vulnerable into deeper penury.
To characterise the genuine cries of a starving population as ‘intellectually inconsistent’ is not just arrogant.
It is a calculated erasure of the government’s moral duty to her people.
To characterise those who point to the resulting misery as being opposed to reform is to ignore the primary duty of governance, the protection of lives and property and the welfare of citizens.
Mr. Yakubu’s dismissal of the United States comparison as ‘superficial’ misses the point entirely.
The lesson to be learned from mature economies is not about the parity of their fiscal systems, but about the relationship between internal policy clarity and external investment.
Capital is notoriously cowardly; it flees volatility.
Investors are not avoiding Nigeria because of a lack of foreign engagements.
They are avoiding the market because the current reforms, characterised by systemic inflation, extreme currency volatility, and an uncompetitive cost of production, have made the domestic environment inhospitable.
Leadership is not merely the imposition of ‘difficult decisions’.
It is the art of sequencing those decisions so that the society we live in survives the transition.
The ‘fiscal cliff’ Mr. Yakubu refers to has, under this wasteful administration, become a chasm into which millions of households have fallen.
To demand patience from a population that can no longer afford basic cost of living is not an economic argument; it is an expression of profound arrogance.
Mr. Yakubu, I put it to you that Nigeria does not need more intellectual justifications for declining living standards.
It requires a pivot from consumption-based, debt-fueled diplomacy to a production-centered domestic policy.
Investors will follow productivity, not photo-ops!
If the current administrations’s foreign engagements are indeed the instruments of recovery Mr. Yakubu claims them to be, then the government should be able to account for them in the only currency that matters.
That currency is the stabilisation of the Naira, the reduction of unemployment, and the easing of the crushing cost of living on the average Nigerian.
Until Tanimu Yakubu can show us the math that matters, not just his theoretical jargon, these justifications for a government he is part of remain nothing more than the desperate, hollow propaganda of an administration failing to meet the basic needs of its people. Be guided!
So Mr. Yakubu, you better be OK for a New Nigeria is POssible!
Aaron writes for PO Express Media, POEM.
