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Chief Atedo Petersideis the president of ANAP Foundation and founder of Stanbic-IBTC bank. In this interview he talks on the Edo State election, role of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), why Nigeria’s democracy should be protected, among others. JOY ANIGBOGU brings the excerpts:
What is your comment on Edoelection, is Nigeria democracy under threat?
After Edo election I put out a tweet. I went on to Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Result Viewing portal (IReV) when I heard all the complaints from people who were in the field in EdoState. I went on to IReV hoping that when I look at the result sheets there, I wouldconclude that they were just making noise over nothing. But some of the result sheets that I saw there shocked me. In an election where the average turnout was 22% or thereabouts, one particular political party, and I’m sure we can all guess which one, was achieving a 98.5% turnout and results in some polling booths, was still, in some polling booths, the total number of votes that that same political party got was larger than the total number of voters that were accredited. I don’t waste my time blaming political parties. They’re not the referee, they’re not the umpire. We must hold INEC culpable. INEC must explain to the nation. Ever since the elections in Osun, where INEC came out with credible result sheets on IReV. I went there also. It’s as if something has changed. Right from the presidential electionthey went rogue. I hope that INEC will be held accountable. And I’m sorry for the decent staff in INEC, because there’s nothing worse than working in the place where half your colleagues have gone rogue, and perhaps your bosses also.
You put out a tweet that was seen by more than 400,000 people, in which you described that ballot in no uncertain terms as a sham. Just tell us more about that…
It’s basically the reasons I gave.
How can you have an election where one particular political party scores more votes than the total number of those accredited? That cannot be an election. I didn’t find a single result sheet like that where the beneficiary was either the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) or Labour Party or anybody else. So it’s one political party that has the ability to generate more votes than the total number of voters accredited. It’s one political party that has the ability to achieve a 98.5% plus turnout, when everywhere else the turnout is below 25%. Let’s call a spade, a spade. Something is seriously wrong.
Beyond the analysis that you’ve done of that election, is that clearly the most recent election in Nigeria, and therefore it remains newsworthy in terms of ongoing analysis of where Nigeria is heading in terms of the practice of improving its elections. So, based on your assessment of that Edo State election, do you think it erodes or strengthens confidence in the electoral system heading towards 2027 general elections?
Of course not. I’ve already said that INEC did very well in Osun state. All the results are still there. Go and look at them on IReV. Since the presidentialelection, they’ve been playing these funny games. I can even tell you what the game is. As soon as people finish voting, you start uploading results. Sometimes they claim there’s a glitch, and it’s always when it looks as if the favoured party is not doing phenomenally well, they create a glitch. Even if they’ve loaded results up to a particular point, they suddenly stop, as happened in Edo, disappear for hours, and then later on they resurface with obviously altered results sheets that changes the whole equation. The point I’m making is that in terms of answering your question about confidence in INEC, if INEC was getting better in every election, you can say confidence is green. If INEC is getting worse, I’m not sure what will happen next in the Anambra.
How does it make you feel with each electionafter that analysis and assessment each time you detect this glaring anomalies?
It raises the bigger question. People say I’m a democrat at heart, but for me democracy means let the person who is most popular, with most votes, win. If we cannot achieve that and allow the voters to decide, then we cannot have any other type of government. What’s the difference between some civilians hijacking results sheets, altering them, pronouncing themselves winners? And INEC says go to court. What is actually the difference between somebody forcing his way into office with falsified results sheets versus somebody using a gun and saying he’s a soldier? For either side, they never got my consent. So I’m not calling for any particular action, but I’m just telling those doing this to be careful. If you completely erode and discontinuance the so-called benefit from having an electionwhere voters have a say, then we can as well finish up with a system where we don’t waste money giving billions to INEC to conduct anelection. If we just grab power and say I’m your boss, what’s the difference?
The first thing that we understand is that the PDP Asue Ighodalo is going to court to seek justice, do you have confidence that he’ll get that justice?
I would not say I have confidence, but I wouldsay that I don’t feel as hopeless about getting justice as I did under the previous Chief Justice of Nigeria. I don’t have any evidence to believe that this newChief Justice will be ten times better, but you have to live in hope. Until somebody misbehaves, you have to believe in them. We have a new Chief Justice. We’ve turned a new page. She has the right qualifications. She has the right pedigree. She comes from a good family. She also has tenure. Some of our past Chief Justices didn’t have tenure. They came in at 69, had a few months, and they were leaving at 70. So they could fool around, make some money, and go. In her own case, she has tenure. By the grace of God, she has at least a few years in office. I think Edo State woulddefine her tenure. I’m not a lawyer. I can sit down and dismiss all the evidence on various ground technicalities and all, and say, oh, let’s just move on. Is she going to spend three years doing that or four years doing that? It’s her call. But I think we should give her a chance. I’ll never condemn anybody that has just been put into a position of leadership. I’ll always give them a chance first. They’re the ones to decide whether we should believe in them or not by their actions.
As you mentioned, there’s a new chief justice in office, you talked about the way she’ll measure the direction she is going to take in the judiciary would be for a start the Edo State election.
Beyond that, she’s one person. Obviously, she’s going to be leading the charge in terms of reforms. Do you think at this point that someone who is not in power in this country can still get justice in Nigeria?
I don’t want to prejudge the situation. Under the previous Chief Justice and some of his earlier colleagues, I felt that only those who are well-connected could get justice. That’s my personal opinion. I give each person a chance based on their pronouncements. This Chief Justice, if you ask most Nigerians about her past cases, I bet you 90% of them will remember her for the Imo State judgment and that’s the nature of life. A doctor conducts 1,000 successful surgeries. If he kills one patient because he forgot the forceps in the stomach that’s the case everybody remembers. The beauty of life, like I put out in my tweet, is that she’s in a unique position. Some people don’t get the chance to make amends. Also, I’m experienced enough to know that you don’t know the human being until you put them on top and make them the leader. Some people look good, you make them the leader and you find they’re terrible. Some people look not so good, make them the leader and they’ll surprise you. Until the bulk stops at somebody’s table, you cannot fully hold them responsible. I don’t buy into this nonsense that it’s only one person, you’re only the CJ. If you’re not going to help to make your place better than how you met it, then you can as well leave the office now. That is across the board, it’s not just about the judiciary. So I think we should hold people accountable from the point when they become the leader and the bulk stops on their table, not before.
It’s clear to everyone that prices are skyrocketing every day whilst the country’s income and that of most people is being depleted. The pace of job creation is slowing, I understand, from some assessments to its lowest pace in decades, which is severely testing the tripwires of this country’s youth. Meanwhile, everyone is screaming about fuel subsidy, which you advocated five years ago should be removed. That is now largely gone. Are you happy with the way things have turned out? I seem to recall that there was a second element to your call for the removal of subsidy, which seems to be missing and is perhaps why there is so much pain….?
Some of us are consistent. You said I called for removal of fuel subsidy five years ago. I started calling for it even before 2012. I was on the economic team in 2012 when President Goodluck Jonathan tried to remove fuel subsidy. Five years ago, I was the keynote speaker when the Nigerian Economic Summit Group was celebrating their 25th anniversary in Abuja. I was the keynote speaker at the dinner for the 25th anniversary and I explained that the big difference between now and then, when I say now, 2019 to 2024 versus 2012 is that now it’s possible to remove a subsidy from the wealthy people or remove a subsidy from everybody and then you give cash transfers to the poor. So, what am I saying? It’s inefficient to subsidize even the wealthiest people in Nigeria, giving them cheap fuel. So, the solution I was advocating is that, remove the subsidy and from some of the revenues you’ve gotten, indeed by making the very rich who consume the most and everybody pays the full price, then you give cash transfers to the poor. And I made the point that now we have a more developed financial system with fintechs and mobile phones and the whole lot where it becomes possible for you to give cash transfers. So, in effect, for the poorest of the poor, they’re still being subsidized but they’d be subsidized by paying the full price for petrol and then receiving some cash from the government. And that cash will not be given to them by NNPCL. The problem with trying to subsidize the petrol price for everybody is that even the billionaires are being subsidized and they consume more of the petrol, indeed, 20, 30 times more with their fleet of cars and everything else. So, I’m saying, remove the subsidy, make everybody pay a market price based on at least full cost recovery and then give cash transfers to the poor. Don’t give cash transfers to the rich. So, effectively, you’re subsidizing the poor by giving cash. They can either use the cash to feed themselves or use the cash to add to what they have to buy petrol or kerosene. So, I’ll explain that the reason the subsidy, the conventional way, getting dispensed by the petrol pump is so expensive is that you end up subsidizing not only the richest people, even your neighbors, and then you get involved in products being billed to the nation which probably were never consumed. All that stops with my recommendation is to go for a market price, remove the subsidy, and then pay cash to the poor.
How do neighboring countries come and get some of that cash for the poor? Almost impossible. You have to go to your LGA with your NIN and whatever and you get paid. So, you can actually subsidize the poor by making sure that they’re identifiable now based on their NIN, national ID card and all that, which is the payment instrument. But you see, what the government did, and I don’t blame the technocrats because it sounds as if the government removed the subsidy in a hurry. So, they never got a chance to discuss things like what I was advocating, which is to simultaneously give cash transfers and not selective cash transfers to a few people.
In that keynote address you complained bitterly about Nigeria’s inflation rate which stood at about 11 percent and you wanted it to go down to about 5 percent. I wonder what your reaction is to what it stands today at well over 30 percent?
I know how we got here and I’m somebody who believes in being fair. It is not true that this government inherited low inflation and took it to the sky. The government inherited inflation that was already in the high teens, but they inherited it against the background where the exchange rate was being manipulated via a crazy multiple exchange rate system. So, when you make that adjustment and allow the exchange rates to be market driven, there is always going to be an initial hump in inflation. So, what you are required to do as the manager of the economy is to take all the necessary actions to quickly bring down the inflation. So, in effect, what I’m saying is that the initial sharp rise in inflation was expected and then your priority is to bring down inflation as fast as you can by doing all the right things on the monetary side, most of which have been done. But I think the reforms should be more holistic than they are. It’s not enough to just have market determined exchange rates, remove subsidies and go home. If you do that, there’ll be phenomenal pain and you may not get the desired results that you’re looking for, even in terms of macroeconomic stability and in terms of growth. There’re many other aspects of a broad reform that are not being pursued with the same seriousness. So, on the fiscal side, why do we have a budget when all kinds of legislators throw in phantom projects into agencies which they are going to go back and collect? All that stuff should be wiped out by a stern president. Call them into your house and tell them, we cannot inflict pain on people and be fooling around giving you billions to go and do what you like with in your village or somewhere else. All those sorts of payments should be wiped out. We should be going through a period of bell tightening. There are other things that should accompany the reform because you want investors to come bringing foreign exchange. Do we have rule of law? You mentioned judiciary. Everybody has to be showing that they’re part of a reform process, bringing in good practices. Even with the famous Oronsaye Report, we still have multiple agencies wasting money on overheads. NNPCL alone must be spending billions on refinery staff that produce nothing. All that waste has to stop in the whole system. It’s not just about exchange rates, fuel prices. This government should make up its mind whether it came to be a corrective regime or you just came to adjust two things and then go on and continue with business as usual. If you continue with business as usual then you make it a lot more difficult and it takes much longer for you to get the gains from the pain that you have inflicted. Even in 2012, if you remember, when we said fuel subsidy was being manipulated, it was inflated, it was corrupt. How can you say something is corrupt and you’ve done nothing about it? Go and check in 2012, there was an investigation, a panel was set up, people were accused, they were charged to court for falsification of subsidy.
Who has been penalized here now for manipulating subsidies or diverting products? So, you have to be corrective in all respects. You don’t just correct exchange rates, correct fuel prices and run away and leave people to go on trying to game the system because they’re your cronies.
Do you think Nigeria should protect its currency or leave it essentially to market forces?
You can have market-determined exchange rates but it’s not going to work if you don’t bring discipline and if you allow every local government chairman or governors to collect their allocation from FAAC in Naira and run to the Bureau de Change or run to the black market and change them to dollars and then next month you give them more Naira again and they do the same thing. That’s why I said you have to embrace a variety of things including stopping all this nonsense that is going on.
English (US) ·