The candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 presidential election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has faulted the economic policies of the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration, stating that they were not data-driven.
 
Adebayo, who was reacting to Vice President Kashim Shettima’s assertion at the recent Nigerian Economic Summit in Abuja that the policies of the government are inevitable and necessary to ensure the prosperity of the country, said the government’s position shows its limited understanding of economics.   
 
Speaking in an interview with select journalists, Adebayo said: “When the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was introduced in the 1980s, there was Chief Olu Falae, Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) at that time, who said there was no alternative to SAP. This idea that there is no alternative is contrary to the whole idea of economics because the whole idea of economics is about alternatives.
 
“The Vice President, with due respect, needs to go back to elementary economics.  The whole idea of economics is to choose from alternatives; to make a choice. They made the wrong choice at the wrong time. That is why they are suffering the consequences.”
 
Noting that the government arrived at the decisions without making use of data, he said: “You don’t just come out and say there is no alternative. You put your data together and then do your econometrics analysis of your data and get data-driven decision making. It is not dogmatic.  Look at their medium term expenditure framework; they are not keeping to it.”
 
Adebayo, who declared that he has zero sympathy for the administration regarding the economic challenges the country is grappling with, noted that the All Progressives Congress (APC) was the party in power before and told Nigerians that they would continue from where former president Muhammadu Buhari stopped. 
 
“Secondly, they said they understood the problem at hand. The president said, ‘don’t pity me’. I know what I am getting involved in. Thirdly, the problems they said they are solving were caused by them. The inflation was caused by them. The rise in factor cost was caused by them. The mischief, which they said they were going to solve, the subsidy, they have not even touched the surface. So, these are their crises,” he said.
 
Adebayo said Tinubu would not achieve anything even if given 40 years in power, stating that the primary objective of a monetary policy in a neo-liberal economy is to achieve full employment.
 
“Have they done that? They have not. That is the problem. So, they are not going anywhere. You can give them 40 years but they are not going anywhere,” he said.
 
He accused the current set of leaders of doing business with Nigerians instead of running the country. His words: “They are not running the country. They are just doing business. Occasionally they get distracted with governmental duties but their primary duty is business. That is why they are trying to run the petroleum industry rather than have a regulatory framework.
 
“They are not running the economy. They are not running the government. They are mercantile in their approach. They see you as a customer since they can get extra money from you by hoarding petrol.
 
“I can get extra money from you by underfunding public education. So, they are not willing to do anything because they are not ready to comply with Chapter 2 of the Constitution which stipulates how governance should be done in Nigeria.”