The president of Africa Sociocultural Harmony and Enlightenment (ASHE) foundation, Prince Justice Faloye, has expressed concerns over the downturn of the Nigerian economy despite the cabinet reshuffle by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

Faloye, in a statement to the media, stated that the removal of the Coordinating Minister of Economy, Wale Edu and replacing him with Taiwo Oyedele, a tax accountant behind retrogressive indirect taxes and the infamous 2026 Tax reforms, will create more chaos for the country’s economy.

Faloye narrates that putting politics, religion, and ethnicity aside, this administration and Nigeria’s political leadership since 1978 have been ideologically disposed to arrest economic development and prosperity.

He mentioned that President Tinubu, an accountant by profession, removed his Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, a neoliberal financial professional who wiped out half of the country’s GDP and increased poverty from 38% to 63%, and replaced him with Taiwo Oyedele, a tax accountant behind retrogressive indirect taxes and the infamous 2026 Tax Reforms.

According to him, this is a neocolonial administration focused on revenue generation for power backers through rent-seeking, not wealth creation to uplift the people.

Faloye noted that previous presidents drew a poverty line they couldn’t push the masses over, saying that Buhari, reputed to be the meanest and most merciless, publicly stated he couldn’t “do it to his people.”

He stated that President Tinubu, removed subsidies, devalued the currency, hiked indirect taxes, and imposed other neoliberal policies that rob the poor to enrich the rich, policies that have failed in sixty black nations since the late seventies.

“Regardless of propaganda and media control, President Tinubu’s economic reforms can never work, not because of his personal attributes, but because there are two economic policy directions. The one Tinubu employs, even with all the time and money in the world, can never empower the masses to prosperity due to its flawed ideological foundations.

“Over sixty Black nations adopted it and failed since the late seventies. Are Africans ignorantly self-destructive, or has it been systemically programmed and imposed?”

Faloye recalled that just as African Americans produce above-average numbers of psychology graduates to understand the psychology of racism, continental Africans have an abnormal number of lawyers and accountants in public office to guide and administer the neocolonial system that exploits and impoverishes the masses.

“Fundamentally, the accountant’s perspective on profit ignores historic and opportunity costs, unlike the economist’s view, which factors in the historic costs of slavery, colonization, and neocolonization,” he stated.

Highlighting the study of economics, started by Adam Smith during slavery, Faloye mentioned that it is classical economics, an economics of Western imperialism and their bankers, with no government planning for the poor until after World War I, when revolutions broke out in Russia.

He said the ‘1929 Great Depression,’ with its huge unemployment and poverty, raised the threat of communist revolutions across Western Europe, noting that it forced Western elites to develop macroeconomics, especially Keynesian economics, using deficit budgeting to boost employment, consumption, and reduce poverty.

According to him, it birthed two ideological positions; Left or Right, capitalist or socialist, neoliberal versus welfarist economics. One for Black economic liberation, the other for Black re-enslavement.

“Following FDR’s 1933 New Deal of massive public works and unemployment benefits, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and leaders of newly independent African and Asian nations adopted this pro-poor Keynesian economics to uplift peoples impoverished by centuries of slavery and colonization.

Chief Awolowo laid out four principles: free education and health for all, rural employment, and full employment via new residential and industrial estates. This brought rapid economic development and prosperity across the black race, both on the continent and in the diaspora, until the mid-seventies, when racist capitalists who had formerly enslaved and exploited them reversed it.”

Continuing, he stated that the 1973 oil price shock gave British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan the excuse to use the IMF/World Bank to reimpose neoclassical economics, pushed by Chicago School professor Milton Friedman.

“In the USA and UK, where civil rights had empowered blacks, their employment sources were destroyed via accounting rationalization and privatization, while Keynesian subsidy economics was restricted to the military-industrial complex.

“Newly independent African nations, trapped by balance-of-payments crises from overvalued oil imports, faced enforced neoclassical (later neoliberal) economics through IMF/World Bank structural adjustment programs.

“These withdrew government support for development and social contracts on education, health, and housing. This Shylock accountant’s perspective failed across Africa, dragging the masses deeper into poverty, while China and Asian nations that rejected it developed rapidly, ” Faloye noted.

“In the 2023 presidential elections, only those vowing fuel subsidy removal and devaluation; Bola Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar, and Peter Obi, attended the UK Chatham House debate and received Western acknowledgment. Chief Awolowo’s welfarist, left-of-center, pro-people perspective lived on in the SDP, espoused by its 2023 candidate Prince Adewole Adebayo, who rightly turned down the invitation, recognizing it as a neocolonial neoliberal contest. The attendees diverted discourse to ethnicity, religion, and moralism, avoiding ideological scrutiny, while promising to run the neocolonial slave plantation more efficiently per IMF and Western dictates.

“Awolowo’s Keynesian economics has been refined: free education and healthcare could be means-tested; rural and full employment achieved via massive public works, building at least 10,000 houses daily for a “roof over every head” and 10 kilometers of rail for “a railway in every local government.”

“This leverages fundamentals: houses build the consumer market; railways yield the highest income and employment multipliers to foster organic heavy manufacturing,” He added.