ADEDOKUN: Good Foundation Has Been Laid

Bayo Adedokun is a lecturer in the University of Lagos. He spoke with TEMILOLUWA ADEOYE on Buhari’s 100 days scorecard. 

How would you access Buhari’s administration, so far? IN terms of budget utilisation, what President Muhammadu Buhari is implementing was actually prepared by his predecessor.

He has no input in it. As we have it now, the permanent secretaries are saddled with the responsibilities of doing that job and implementing the budget based on what a minister would have done, because the ministers that left handed over to them.

One of the things that have actually hampered his achievement in budget implementation has to do with the absence of ministers. Though, he is only being careful, however, for how long would he be? Constitutionally, ministers are supposed to be appointed, but it did not specify the period. Those are the loopholes we have in our constitution.

The president should know that he cannot do the job alone, and there are still credible Nigerians that he can check their credentials to see if they are as clean as expected.

How would you rate his performance in terms of policy formulation and implementation? In the area of education, his performance is hard to access, because we don’t have minister for education.

But what is very obvious about this present government is, the achievement in the security sector, several billions of Naira had been spent in that sector and we didn’t see the impact, but within the short period he came in, we felt it. Yes, we still have a handful of problems in the Northeast, but you can see that Boko Haram as an organisation has been weakened.

You will see that the kind of attack they used to carry out before, where they cut off a whole village is no longer there, and I believe the deadline set to achieve this might be possible.

Let’s look at unemployment; the Bureau of Statistics’ latest report says unemployment has gone up by 69 per cent in the last three months, what do you think about that? The public sector alone cannot absorb the number of unemployed youths that we have.

Just judge it by the number of graduates we produce in all our universities, polytechnics and colleges of education, yearly. We push them into the industrial reserve army; people who are waiting to be employed.

Government needs to look at how they can create opportunities in the private sector by giving us some basic infrastructure that will make the private sector invest in Nigeria. Government cannot employ everybody neither can the private sector.

We must also sound it to the young people that they need to have an entrepreneurship mind; creating their own job in order to solve the problems of the society.

How has the economy fared in the last 100 days? What Buhari is doing now will not give immediate benefit, but will give a long-term benefit. Investors and governments all over the world are watching to see if the fight against corruption would be genuine or not.

If it is genuine and well done, Nigeria’s rating in the global world by Transparency International would be better and investors take decisions based on that.

So, I believe what he is doing is like laying foundation. Fighting corruption will increase our investment climate. Looking at the All Progressives Congress (APC), some of their states have reneged on their promise of free education; why so?

When politicians are seeking for votes, many of them do not ask experts to do a cost benefit analysis of their decision, they just make public pronouncement.

That is the difference between public pronouncement and public policy. They now renege because they have seen the reality in terms of what that pronouncement will cost them.

So far, how would you rate President Buhari’s overall performance? That would be average, because not too many things have happened. This is primarily because he is the only player in the executive arm of government.

If he appoints ministers, and we can see the policy trickling down on the rest of the masses, then it would be a better assessment. More over, 100 days is too short to rate the president out of four year.