Recently, Indermit Gill, the World Bank’s chief economist and senior vice-president for development economics, wrote an article in the Financial Times urging Nigerians to embrace the economic reforms of their president, Bola Tinubu. “The country’s elites must forge a political consensus in support of these reforms,” he said.
Like every seasoned policy expert, Gill knows that without a political consensus, no reform, especially a radical one, can succeed. However, what he failed to say is why there is no political consensus in favour of Tinubu’s economic reforms. Yet, addressing that point is, in part, key to understanding why Tinubu is so unpopular, and why few embrace his “reforms”.
First of all, let’s be clear. Tinubu is the most unpopular civilian president in Nigeria’s political history to date. For a start, his awkward past and the controversial manner in which he became president – his divisive Muslim-Muslim ticket, self-serving and ethnocentric ‘emi-lokan/Yoruba-lokan’ calculations and deeply flawed election – gave Tinubu the hardest-ever landing for a president. No previous Nigerian president emerged under such untoward circumstances. Second, Tinubu’s utter unpreparedness for power, beyond a self-entitled claim to it, evidenced by his impulsive and rash approach to governance, has produced perverse consequences, making him even more unpopular.
However, one major factor that is rarely acknowledged in Nigeria is Tinubu’s shallow ‘mandate’ and the arrogant way he has ruled in spite of it. The Economist and the Financial Times recognised long ago that Tinubu’s “weak mandate” could be an albatross on how he governed. But Nigerians hardly talk about Tinubu’s shallow ‘mandate’ and the constraint it places upon his ability to enact painful reforms. Yet, theory and empirical evidence tell us that the nature of a government’s mandate matters hugely.
In the book, The Political Economy of Policy Reform, edited by the renowned economist John Williamson, several scholars studied successful economic reforms in many countries and distilled from those studies key principles about when economic reforms could or could not succeed. Two of those hypotheses are relevant here: one is the crisis hypothesis; the other is the mandate hypothesis. So, what do the hypotheses say?
Well, according to the crisis hypothesis, only a major crisis can jolt a country out of sclerosis and trigger fundamental reforms. Thus, when a country faces a major crisis, tough reforms are easier to push through than when it faces no existential crisis. However, the mandate hypothesis says that there is greater scope for radical reforms if a government won a clear and strong electoral mandate for change than if it won a weak mandate. A government with a strong mandate will, at least initially, enjoy a honeymoon and face weak oppositions, both conducive for bold reforms, whereas a government with a weak mandate might run into troubled waters too soon!
Now, everyone will agree that the crisis hypothesis favours Tinubu. Of course, his party left Nigeria’s economy totally distorted and comatose in its eight years in power from 2015 to 2023. Yet, many analysts would concede that, as president, Tinubu should undertake far-reaching reforms to tackle the crisis. But the mandate hypothesis does not favour him. Tinubu won only 36.6 per cent of the popular vote, meaning that 63.4 per cent of the voters rejected him. Out of the 24m total votes cast in the presidential election, he received only 8.8m, meaning that a whopping 15.2m voters rejected him. Of course, he won the plurality of votes but that’s different from winning the majority of the total votes cast. That lack of popular mandate reinforces the political polarisation in Nigeria. Coupled with the poor handling of the weak mandate, it also explains why there’s no political consensus and popular support for Tinubu’s economic reforms.
Here’s a simple test. If you carried out an opinion poll across Nigeria today, you would find that most of those who voted for Tinubu in 2023 are making excuses for him. Even though they face economic hardship like most other Nigerians, they blame former President Muhammadu Buhari, not Tinubu, for it. But ask those who did not vote for Tinubu in 2023, most of them would blame him squarely for the current situation. Everything is viewed through a polarised political filter. That’s consistent with theory. According to the “choice supportive bias” heuristic in behavioural economics, people think positive about a choice once made even if it has flaws. Put simply, people don’t have buyer’s remorse easily unless something dramatic happens that forces them to change their minds.
Which brings us to how Tinubu has handled his weak mandate. First, let’s be clear: the mandate Tinubu has is to govern with humility and consensus, not magisterially like an absolute monarch. Former Governor Kayode Fayemi famously said: “You can’t have 35 per cent of the vote and take 100 per cent. It won’t work.” But Tinubu governs arrogantly, taking far-reaching decisions unilaterally as if he won a landslide victory. Instead of seeking genuine cross-party consensus, he is using Nyesom Wike to cripple the PDP and using other attack dogs in his government to undermine the Labour Party. Yet, together, PDP, under Atiku Abubakar, and Labour Party, under Peter Obi, secured 13m votes or 54.5 per cent in last year’s presidential election. Those voters can’t be wished away!
Ideally, given the enormity of the challenges and the need to forge a political consensus for far-reaching reforms, Nigeria should have had a government of national unity. Neither Atiku nor Obi opposes, in principle, withdrawing the fuel subsidy or removing the currency peg, although both said they would have done so differently. Thus, instead of being “possessed by courage” and blurting out “subsidy is gone” and abruptly announcing other consequential economic policies on his first day in office, Tinubu should have forged a political consensus behind those reforms but in thoughtful, impact-driven ways that would mitigate their adverse consequences and win public support for them.
