Former National Vice-Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, South-West, Mr Bankole Adefemi Oluwajana, in this interview, speaks on President Bola Tinubu’s performance, the state of Nigeria’s economy, agriculture, restructuring, and the 2027 general elections, among other national issues. Wale Igbintade brings excerpts.
What is your assessment of President Bola Tinubu’s vision and performance so far?
President Tinubu is very brilliant and knows what he is doing and where he is taking Nigeria. He means well for Nigeria. Presidents before him majorly had governance in mind. In addition to governance, the government of President Tinubu has introduced restructuring, growth and economic stability. If there are lapses and mistakes, they are not deliberate. Such hitches are not unusual, and the rough edges can be smoothened.
Obviously, President Tinubu wants a well-structured and better future for Nigeria. The naira deregulation and removal of subsidy are good policies. Now, Nigerians travel abroad with goods to sell there, earn income and return with empty boxes. Before now, it was the other way around—Nigerians would go abroad with empty boxes and return with boxes filled with goods. This was injurious to the economy. The reversal of this trend is good for the economy.
We are making good progress, as shown by the increase in our reserves from $28 billion under President Jonathan to $54 billion now, an increase of almost 100 per cent within a few years. Economically, we are moving forward, and there is global acknowledgement of this. It will be disastrous to reverse the course.
Looking at political dynamics, what caused the APC’s loss in Osun State?
On politics, the loss to the Accord Party in Osun State was expected. It couldn’t have been otherwise. The man who won, Governor Adeleke, is one of us. Our candidate, the candidate of the APC in the election, is good. The man who believes himself to be the leader of the APC structure in Osun State, the immediate former governor, doesn’t have what it takes to lead progressives. He is not charismatic, looks like an introvert, and his human relations are weak. He never would have been in politics but for his closeness to the President.
His deputy, Benedict Alabi, would have done better. Baba Akande would have done far better, even at his age. There are so many strong politicians in the APC—Bashiru, Omisore, Fadahunsi, Omoworare and many others. Oyetola was the weak link.
How do you evaluate the current state of opposition parties ahead of the forthcoming elections?
On the forthcoming election, it is very obvious that there is no serious opposition, or the opposition parties are not serious. The supposedly biggest of them all, the ADC, has no governorship candidate in Abia, Cross River, Enugu, Ebonyi, Kano, Katsina and Taraba States, comprising 159 LGAs, about 20 per cent of Nigeria. Kano alone has 44 LGAs and has the largest voting bloc in the North. Kano is one of the two swing states that decide presidential elections. The NDC is in an even worse dilemma.
The opposition candidates are in three categories. Some are dreamers, often misled by marabouts and prophets. The second category comprises serial contenders who gather together those who are angry with President Tinubu, those who do not like him, and some former associates who have fallen out with him. In this second group, we have strange bedfellows. How can we explain Aregbesola, a known progressive socialist, pairing up with an anti-democratic dictator like David Mark, who retired as a military irredentist, and an aggressive capitalist like Atiku? It is impossible to have a unified team from such a concoction.
The third group comprises unduly ambitious young men without structure. They assume that a riot, protest or upheaval can bring them to power, forgetting that the same upheaval may consume them.
Anywhere in the world, including the United States of America, you cannot be a serious contender in a democracy without a structure. It takes time and serious work by serious-minded people, acting with principles and without anger, envy or jealousy, to form a formidable team or party.
The election is just a few months away, and the understanding of major opposition figures of what a campaign means is to abuse President Tinubu on social media like kindergarten children fighting over a bar of chocolate or groundnuts. The battle has been won even before it started. There is no contest.
Is your party not threatened by the move by the opposition to field a single presidential candidate to challenge Tinubu?
It cannot work. This is why it cannot work. You see, many of them are people of ambition. And people of ambition don’t look at any other person’s interest. That explains why Peter Obi kept jumping from one party to another.
The same thing with Atiku. Atiku also is a man of ambition, and he has changed parties—virtually every available party that you have seen. So, you can see, at the end of the day, assuming they now say they want to work together, that means that they have already acknowledged that they have failed.
In other words, Atiku will work with Peter Obi when he knows that Obi cannot win, and Obi knows that Atiku cannot win. Are you getting the point? So, for me, all of them together constitute an opposition. They are sharing the number of people who are opposed, for instance, to Tinubu. But again, I will add that such a concoction cannot work. And I have not seen signs that they are telling us anything—anything that they didn’t say in 2023.
The only thing right now is that they are talking about the supposed case against Tinubu in the United States. Come on, was it not there in 2023? And how does that affect Nigeria? Are the votes to be cast by the international community, by Americans? It just doesn’t make sense. So, to me, whatever anybody is doing anywhere will not succeed.
The President has been distributing the subsidy savings to governors. What can Nigerians do to make the governors do more for the people?
Well, thank you so much. You know, if you observe the way Tinubu operates, he knows that, in a democracy, as the structure is in Nigeria, the governors hold a lot of power in the states. That wasn’t created by him. That was created by the Constitution. So, he’s trying to make the best of a seemingly bad situation. There’s nothing he could have done. He still has to use them to be able to reach the people as much as possible.
And, in his own way, as he’s counselling them, he recently spoke about, “Look, don’t spend too much money on bridges.” He’s telling them that, “Look, you have to do more than that. You have to reach the people. You have to find a way of making sure that you perform your role as a governor.” That’s the best he can do—we don’t have a unitary government in Nigeria.
We have a federal system, which Tinubu is even trying to improve. Are you getting the point? It’s still the best we can have. But I will also agree with you that the governors need to do much more than what they are doing.
Tinubu has been known to be an advocate of restructuring the body politic. How far has he been able to do that?
You know, in four years—I will say in three years—you can’t achieve the ultimate. But people would have observed that he is gradually restructuring Nigeria.
He’s doing what people before him never did. For example, it is now a known fact that the states are richer than they used to be. Another example is the fact that he’s trying to reach the nooks and crannies of the country with a network of roads, trains and every other thing.
So, for me, Tinubu has moved us forward in restructuring. But we are not yet there. By the time he finishes his second term, hopefully, we will have gotten there. He has shown us signs that he has restructuring in mind. And this is not a military regime that can just wake up one day and restructure through military fiat like what a former Head of State, Aguiyi-Ironsi, did or what another person did at that time. With democratic limitations, he’s definitely pursuing restructuring.
The issue of subsidy removal is criticised by opposition figures like Atiku Abubakar, who point out that other nations maintain subsidies and that Nigerians benefited from them. How do you respond to this argument?
Atiku is a political gangster! Who is a gangster? Somebody who wants to get what he wants by force. He’s saying whatever he could say to show that he could do something better. But his history does not justify that. The same Atiku spoke about subsidy when they were running the first election. Atiku will say anything just to try to—want to give the dog a bad name to hang it. And serious people will not take him seriously.
Leaving the messenger aside, what about the core message that everyday Nigerians actually need government subsidies?
Look, let me tell you. People like you and me, we belong to a supposedly elite group. Just listen. You have a large percentage of Nigerians who don’t have the opportunities that you have.
Subsidy has enriched the privileged because they have the network of friends. They know how to tap into it. If subsidy is returned, it will favour people like you and me. But it will further enlarge the gap between the rich and the poor. Why? Because the elite, the privileged people like you and me, capitalise on it.
Look at what was happening during the subsidy? There are two things: subsidy and deregulation. Those are two major things. I will tell you what happened, for instance, in deregulation.
Nigerians are very smart. The smartness of Nigerians is not limited to only the Yahoo boys. The only thing is that some people use it positively; some use it in a way that work against the system.
What people were doing was that they would incorporate a company in the United States, where they wanted to buy, say, a phone. So, the company they had incorporated in the US would raise an invoice saying that the item could be bought for $10,000. They would use the $10,000 to source foreign exchange here, and the foreign exchange would be taken to them. They would then buy the item for $2,000 over there. They would repatriate the $8,000 and sell it where people were struggling to obtain dollars here. They made money without working.
It even happened the other way before, when the naira was stronger than the pound. You know what used to happen? You would change sterling here, say £1,000. The £1,000 you had changed here, Nigerians would go to the UK and sell it on the streets. They would come back to Nigeria with naira worth £1,300. They wouldn’t bring in any goods at all. So, goods were not coming to Nigeria, yet formal transactions were going on.
So, people were buying—the rich people were buying houses in Potomac. We know them. They have houses in Potomac. Potomac is a very expensive place in Maryland, near Washington. They have houses there. Now, they can’t do that anymore; it’s tough.
Do you see ethnicity and religion shaping the outcome of the 2027 election like they did in 2023?
I would say that ethnicity and religion always have some effect, but this time around, the effect will be diminished more than what we witnessed in 2023 when there was so much talk about the muslim-muslim ticket. If you google it, that clamour has gone down for the president
In fact, a major advocate of the issue at the time is now a spokesman, Daniel Bwala. And the other major advocate has been silent, former SGF, Babachir Lawal. Lawal has suddenly realised that the issue has not really worked against Christians. If anything, else, he’s subtly praising Tinubu. It wasn’t like that before; he was so antagonistic. So, the noise-making about muslim-muslim at that time has gone down.
Now, when you talk about ethnicity, a majority of the governors in the North are all pro-Tinubu. I mean, are they not Northerners? The Fulani and the Fulani effect—you think it’s going to work against Tinubu one day? Is Senator Sani, the man in Kaduna, not a thoroughbred Fulani? Are you getting the point? But thank God for people like him. I think Nigeria is improving. We are not going to get there overnight, but one after another. Hopefully, by the time Tinubu is done with the additional four years, the person we will have there will also be as broad-minded as Tinubu has been.
Is there anything you would have loved the President to do differently during his tenure?
Well, I don’t know. I pray that—if you know Tinubu very well, if you have been following his trajectory, Tinubu is not one of those who sit down to share the national cake. What I mean by that is, he doesn’t look at somebody who is waiting for the budget or the money of the state and take a portion. For me, that is what I’m seeing in him.
In your state, Ondo, why is there political tension between Governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa and Minister Tunji-Ojo?
Well, I will make two comments. The first comment I’ll make is that, if you observe, the major leaders—leaders, I mean anybody I call a leader now, somebody who has held a position in the state. I’ve mentioned; I will mention my humble self because I was a former National Vice-Chairman. I will mention the former Governor, Mimiko. I will mention the deputies, Ali Olanusi and Mimiko’s deputy, Agboola Ajayi, yes.
Part of what leaders learn—mature leaders—is that you never criticise or work against your party openly. The man carries the flag of your party in the state. And this happens also in the United States. That’s why, no matter what Donald Trump does, you hardly see Republican senators criticising him openly.
As a matter of fact, they almost automatically give him the ticket for the next election. It’s cultural. Because when you diminish the image of that person, you are watering down the image of your party. This new generation of politicians don’t understand that. It does not necessarily mean that we approve of everything that he does. We’ll tell him. In his space, many of us don’t go—we have no business, we don’t get contracts from him. We are not expecting appointments from him. I can’t be commissioner again; I can’t be anything. Are you getting the point?
Secondly, as to whether he comes back, whether he wants to come back, that is not for me to decide. Is Tunji-Ojo an inexperienced person who will talk about such a thing? In politics, anybody is free to aspire to be anything. When the time comes, we will cross it. If we don’t cross it, law will cross it. If law has crossed it, it will be re-echoed again. So, why should that be an issue?
Finally, even Tunji-Ojo will not admit that they are fighting. Neither will the governor say they are fighting. So, who am I to say that they are fighting? It’s also just human speculation as to what is happening—but I think I’ve made enough comment for you to understand. Are you getting the point?
Even if I have reservations, I will see the governor and tell him. If he’s not doing right, I’m APC to the core. I will never come on the street and begin to clamour and make it a point. I will see the governor directly and tell him. That is why you see me in the Governor’s Advisory Council.
How do you view Nigeria’s shift away from its original agricultural base over the decades?
Nigerians need to understand that God created Nigeria in the world for a purpose. That purpose is to grow and supply food to the world. Activities shifting our focus away from agriculture and towards other areas are misplaced—we are simply on a frolic of our own. From the 1960s, it became a culture in Nigeria that every graduate must get a white-collar job, preferably in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt or Kano. Graduation became a walk away from farming, creativity and self-employment. Every other job, including farming, was abandoned.
When Nigeria gained independence in 1960, Nigeria supplied over 50 per cent of the palm oil consumed in the world. Today, Nigeria supplies about two per cent. Malaysia and Indonesia, which took seedlings from Nigeria, now supply 85 per cent. Cocoa, groundnuts, cashew nuts and several other farm products are suffering the same neglect.
How has urbanisation and the quest for white-collar employment affected cities like Lagos and the rural areas?
One of the negative effects of colonisation in Nigeria is that the vast majority of Nigerians aspire to take up white-collar jobs and become employees after graduation. Many followed that pattern and ended up in Lagos, which offered the best opportunities for white-collar employment.
At independence in 1960, the population of Lagos was less than 800,000, about the size of Ikorodu Local Government Area today. When I came to Lagos in 1978, the population was about two million. Lagos is now about 25 million. It is projected that Lagos alone will have more than 35 million people in a few years’ time.
Most of the industries established between 1970 and 2000 that offered thousands of job opportunities have folded up, yet many people are still limiting themselves to office jobs and employment, wearing coats and ties. Some will still come to Lagos this week looking for jobs that are no longer available. They will be compelled to live in slums and uncompleted buildings, just like the prodigal son.
Where they are migrating from, in the farmlands of the countryside, you don’t see mad people on the streets at night because family members can accommodate them, sometimes in an entire house.
What impact is foreign involvement having on Nigeria’s agricultural sector and cash crop economy?
While our people are rushing out for what they call greener pastures in foreign lands, the Chinese, Indians and fellow Africans are taking over our land for farm plantations—cocoa, oil palm, cashew, timber and so on. Virtually all the major oil palm plantations in Nigeria, with the exception of one or two, are indirectly owned by foreigners. These people are not producing for the local market. They get paid in dollars outside Nigeria, which they smartly keep outside Nigeria.
The majority of the cash crops now existing on farms—cocoa, kola nuts, bitter kola, cashew nuts and timber—were planted in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. They have now almost reached the end of their lifespan. No new plantations exist, even when there are now better hybrids that will bear fruit within three to four years. The market for agricultural products is inexhaustible, nationally and globally.
Where do you see the biggest potential for Nigerian agricultural exports going forward?
In a few years’ time, there will be scarcity of bitter kola, kola nuts and cocoa because most of the ones available now were planted by our grandfathers more than 70 years ago and will soon stop fruiting. Every economic tree has a lifespan.
In the meantime, the most populous nation on earth, China, has opened up to the world, and the Chinese are as traditional as Africans. They need roots, herbs, leaves and other items that cannot be grown on their soil.
The demand for bitter kola increased sharply and its value quadrupled during COVID, and it has remained high because some pharmaceutical companies now use it to compound medicines, following the immunity effect that was observed during COVID. Researchers are making discoveries every day that the plants around us are medicinal.