Re-basing the presidential campaign 2 BY OUR REPORTER ON JANUARY 26, 2015 TRENDING BY PETER NTEPHE The 2015 presidential electioneering campaign seems to be degenerating into a slandering match. Campaign speeches are long on personal attacks but palpably limited on economic plans and an explicit agenda for governance in the next four years. As for ideology, it appears we have long given up the pretence in Nigeria that there could be an ideological underpinning for party formation and aspiration to rule. When the candidates deign to give promises, they are often lacking in explication and worse, seem to be reading from identikit campaign sheets. “My government will combat corruption” seems to be this season’s favourite, closely followed by bare pledges to deliver on electricity and increase employment opportunities. There is, of course, the odd ‘rogue promise’ such as General Muhammadu Buhari’s on stabilising oil prices but generally there is little to distinguish the campaigns so far, on substance. The pity with this uniformity in approach and ambiguity is that the essence of electoral choice – differentiation based on the perceived superiority of a party’s plans for government if elected – disappears. The electorate is then forced to conjure such puerile decision-making parameters as which of the candidates has the better looking wife, a currently trending point of contention among supporters of the two main parties! The All Progressives Congress (APC) appears to be reveling in the direction in which the campaign has gone. For a party that styles itself as progressive, its manifesto has been surprising in its brevity, turgidity and shallowness. One would have expected a serious opposition to attempt a comprehensive alternative agenda to observed the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) strategy and actions in government. The APC seems, curiously, to have not been interested at all. Conveniently for them however, the dovetailing of the campaign into ‘he said, she said and I said’ has diverted attention from their patent ill-preparedness to offer any better solutions than the PDP has implemented since 1999. It becomes incumbent upon the PDP perhaps, to seek to quickly reposition the debate, or at least some part of it, so as to expose the paucity of the opposition’s promise to Nigerians. And it will be the responsibility of the president’s minders, speechwriters and spokespeople, because the president himself must have a lot to contend with in running a campaign whilst still having to run the country. Here’s how they might do it. They might seek to elaborate and celebrate the party’s achievements in government and particularly those of the incumbent president who is running for another term. They would use that as the pedestal to justify another four years in Federal Government. And they would then boldly challenge the APC to demonstrate how the APC could have done or plans to do better. The President’s people might wish to build structures and integration around the PDP manifesto to show comprehensiveness in planning and execution. They can start by establishing the PDP’s manifesto to be a centrist one, quoting from its preamble where it promises a ‘dynamic economy’ that deploys ‘market forces’ yet seeks to build a ‘just society which provides basic needs (and) ensures equal opportunities.’ They would seek to show how much, as a party and president in power, the PDP has pursued these goals. The economy would be the poster child for demonstrating the extent to which President Jonathan’s Transformation Agenda has wrought changes for the better. The president’s men and women would do this particularly when they address the chattering urban and intellectual classes. They would point to the doubling of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), whether on the rebased or on prior measures between 2009 when Jonathan first took office and now. They would point to the increase in per capita income from $1,091 to $1,721 between 2009 and 2013 even before rebasing. The PDP campaign can establish that this government has done more than most before it to break the dependence on oil. They would point to the increase in non-oil revenue from less than N1 trillion in 2009 to $1.5 trillion in four years. They should also celebrate the lowering of the inflation rate from 15 per cent to eight per cent in four years, stemming significantly from having reduced Nigeria’s food import bill from over N1trillion in 2009 to less than N700 billion currently. Before the APC’s surprised policy wonks can Google Nigeria’s macro-economic statistics for the first time, the president’s people would have moved to some of the things the working classes hold dear. Roads? They can point to the extensive work done on federal roads, including the completion of the Onitsha-Owerri and Vom-Manchok roads. We would talk about extensive rehabilitation carried out on the Apapa-Oshodi, Benin-Ore-Shagamu, Enugu-Port Harcourt, Kano-Maidugri and Abuja-Abaji-Lokoja highways. The completed Oweto Bridge across the River Benue and the second Nigeria Bridge under construction would feature in the reference points. Much of this work has been funded by the Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P) into which the government has injected the savings from the reduction in petroleum subsidies. The message on railways – the common man’s favorite means of long-distance commute – is already clear. The president has made the railways work after a comatose quarter of a century. A significant part of the funding has, again, come from SURE-P. The Lagos-Kano line is functional once more and work is advanced on the Port- Harcourt-Maiduguri line. New lines are under construction from Kaduna to Abuja, Kano to Maiduguri and Lagos to Port Harcourt. The opposition’s best comeback so far – that the coaches should be ‘more modern’ – should be easily dismissed with a wave of the hand and laughter in the many indigenous Nigerian languages. Power? The PDP campaign should take the discourse on electricity beyond the opposition’s woolly promises and brandish the Power-Sector Road Map established by Jonathan’s government. They can explain how 11 distribution companies and six generation companies have been successfully privatized and handed over to private-sector owners. They should of course draw attention to the boosting of electricity output to an average of over 4,000 megawatts per day. They should point to the palpable reduction in power cuts and top it with the revelation that government, working hard on gas supply issues through the Gas Master Plan, is on track to increase power supply to over 16,000 megawatts on the average next year. If the APC raised the lazy objection of increases in tariffs, the president’s campaign team would be well would retort with the economic necessity to permit market forces, the PDP manifesto’s underlying theme. But they would go further to explain carefully that the poor currently pay more than N80 per kilowatt hour (‘kWh’) in burning candles and kerosene while those who can afford generators spend N50-70/kWh. By contrast, even with tariff increases, grid power still costs only N18-23/kWh. While the opposition struggles to work out kilowatt hours, the president’s team would have made the leap to agriculture where they would once again reiterate the nearly 50 per cent reduction in the food-import bill during the Jonathan years. They should beat their chests that domestic food output has risen by over 21 million metric tons in the last three years with more than $5.6 billion of additional investment having been attracted into the sector by president’s policies. They should use rice, that pan- Nigerian staple, to illustrate: annual rice production has gone up from 2.3 million metric tons at the inception of the Jonathan regime to 3.1 million and the private sector has responded by developing 14 new industrial-scale rice mills. Continuing on agriculture, they can point to the elimination of 40 years of monumental corruption, in just 90 days, by removing government from the procurement and distribution of fertilizer. The administration has instead constituted government merely the regulator that makes policies for efficient private-sector delivery and a provider of subsidies. Wastage that amounted to N776 billion was ended summarily in this way. The PDP government of Jonathan instituted a farmer registration scheme, a first in Africa, under which the biometric data of over 11 million farmers has been recorded. The government pioneered an e-wallet scheme (now sought to be copied by countries like China and Brazil) through which all the farmers on the database receive farm-subsidy coupons which they redeem at the point of purchase of inputs from the private sector. While fertilizer reached less than 11 percent of farmer end-users under the previous distribution regime, more than 92 percent of the farmers in the government’s database now receive fertilizer, seeds and other essential inputs. In an item already overflowing with achievement, the president’s campaign would tack on the Youth Employment in Agriculture Program (YEAP) established by the PDP government. The scheme is designed to encourage youthful entrepreneurship in commercial agriculture with the government targeting the emergence of up to a million such ‘nagropreneurs’ by the end of 2015. Agro-processing is also a key feature of the president’s National Industrial Revolution Plan (NIRP) while the National Sugar Master Plan, launched in 2013, provides a roadmap for 100% local production of sugar within a decade. Already, concessions granted domestic sugar refineries under the plan have seen an increase in capacity utilization from 60 to 75 percent and the price of sugar reduce from about N10,000 per 50kg bag to about N6,000, the lowest price seen in over four years. By 2018, local production should be up to 700,000 metric tons with over 60,000 new jobs created.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 10:24:19 +0000
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