The President, his Vice and their Splendour Republic 

IKEM OKUHU

Ikem Okuhu, a journalist, author, PR professional, brand strategist and teacher, is the CEO of BRANDish, publishers of BRANDish, Nigeria’s first nationally circulating Brands and Marketing magazine. He has a career that has traversed print media, oil & gas, banking and entrepreneurship. Ikem is the author of the book, “PITCH: Debunking Marketing’s Strongest Myths”, a dispassionate exposition of the dos and don’ts of successful engagement in the marketplace, especially the Nigerian marketplace. He can be reached on + 234 8095121535 (text only) or brandishauthority@gmail.com

Rather than wear sackcloth and sit in Aso Rock Villa to mourn and manage the embarrassing kidnap of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok town in Borno State, which was damaging his presidency then, Goodluck Jonathan, just two days after the kidnapping took place on April 14, travelled to Kano for his political party campaign rally. Yet, two months after the incident and still having not visited the scene of the incident and families of the abducted schoolgirls, he chose to travel to Equatorial Guinea for a meeting of the African Union in June 2014. President Jonathan was heavily criticised for his insensitivity to the challenges at home, and in one of his Presidential Media chats, he rationalised his action by saying that, “the moment a president of Nigeria stops travelling to any part of the world because there is a crisis at home, then Nigeria is in trouble.”

This statement which presented former President Jonathan as naïve and insensitive drew streams of caustic criticisms, and rightly so, from several quarters, and I must say, including the group of people now occupying the Nigerian presidency with many comparing the former Nigerian helmsman to someone pretentiously in the pursuit of frivolities while his house was on fire.

Like everything Nigeria, everyone appears to have forgotten about this even as the identifiable culpable sins of the former president have been retained, and committed in varying degrees of heightened impunity. From Muhammadu Buhari to the current presidency of Bola Tinubu, it does not look like we have witnessed any departure from leadership insensitivity. If anything, what is with us is an entitled leadership that extracts maximum comfort from a people who are expected to sacrifice their lives and living for the comfort of those they elected to make their lives better.

Perhaps as a demonstration of the consciousness of Tinubu’s presidency to the crushing economic situation of Nigerians, the Chief of Staff to President Bola Tinubu, Femi Gbajabiamila, announced days ago that the delegation from Nigeria to the United Nations General Assembly which will be held from November 22 – 24, 2024 has been cut down.

Gbajabiamila, while addressing a retreat in Abuja, had, according to a statement credited to Presidential spokesman, Ajuri Ngelale, said, “I have received a directive from Mr. President that this time, we will be strict. If you have no business at the UN General Assembly, do not step foot in America, and this is a directive from Mr. President.”

I guess this press statement was meant to attract positive sentiments against the background of the flak that trailed the dizzying contingent of 1,411 delegates that the country sponsored to the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change summit held in Dubai, UAE, early in December 2023. With the people of Nigeria going through unprecedented economic hardship, President Tinubu’s men must have thought soundbites that point towards more prudent management of resources and expenditure containment were bound to present his presidency in good light before everyone.

I am not sure this gesture would go far enough, and I will explain.

Since he assumed office as Nigeria’s president on May 29, 2023, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has allocated a staggering N26.5 billion to himself and his Vice President, Kasim Shettima. This includes the N7.6 billion allocated for travels, N660 million for feeding, N201 million for feeding the animals in the zoo located at the Presidential Villa, and the N7 billion for the renovation of the official residences of the president and his vice in Lagos and Abuja. This number is in addition to the N28 billion voted in the 2023 Supplementary Budget for the renovation of the offices of the President and the Vice.

From this, and from a few more that will follow, it would seem that besides taxing Nigerians, the presidency favours swelling the expenditure side of the national balance sheet while sidestepping the creative ways of growing the income side. Items and activities that have the potential to multiply income and put economic power in the hands of Nigerians appear not to impress Mr. President and his team.

Our presidency can only be compared to a Splendour Republic considering the way it spends. It would appear the occupants of Nigeria’s seat of power just recline in their chairs and think up only how to spend money. For a country with a total appropriation of just N30 trillion (including the supplementary budget of 2023) to allocate close to N30 billion for the entertainment of the president and his vice is hard to understand.

I know it is usually convenient for our leaders to make comparisons with “saner climes” such as the US, and that is why it will be necessary to place side-by-side the management of the two nations’ seats of power vis-à-vis their annual expenditure projections.

The United States for fiscal 2024 made a budget projection of approximately $7 trillion. You do not want to think what this means in Naira, but in case you want to hear, that is approximately N1.05 quadrillion. One quadrillion has a suffix of 15 zeroes!

Compare that to our N28 trillion annual budget and you will see how tiny we are. But then in the same US, the budget for maintaining the White House, based on the available figure for the year 2019 was just $805 million, and it covered costs for staffing, security, grounds maintenance, renovations, furniture, portraits, etc. It is recorded that the only time Americans spent quite heavily on their president was in 2020 when Donald Trump cost American taxpayers more. This appeared crazy, especially when compared to the $47 million spent for Barack Obama and the $39 million for George W Bush.

I may not be a statistician but I love thinking in percentages because of its ability to portray the differences in numbers. In the case of the United States, expenditure allocated for the maintenance of the White House as compared to the federal budget indicated that America spends only about 0.0143 percent of its annual budget on the presidency!

Please be informed that this number went this high because for ease of statistics, and to give allowance for possible increases that would possibly have occurred between 2019 and 2024, we approximated the $805 million White House budget to $1 billion.

If the United States spends 0.0143 percent of its annual budget to maintain its presidency, there is no way it would make sense for Nigeria to spend about 0.154 percent of its budget on its own. The stat for Nigeria is even incomplete because this calculation did not factor in the close to N950 million that was said to have been spent in the acquisition of the newest of Mr. President’s toys, a Cadillac Escalade said to have cost a jaw-dropping N950 million. It also does not capture the N3.4 billion spent on the acquisition of sundry luxury cars for the First Lady and the endless legions of minions and coteries of aides in and around the president’s sprawling court.

The tally here does not also include the N150 billion ($100 million) which, according to Premium Times, was spent in the acquisition of Tinubu’s new presidential jet, a well-pimped Airbus a330 which made its inaugural “presidential flight” on August 19, 2024, flying the president to France for an undisclosed “brief work stay,” according to another statement by Ajuri Ngelale.

Pray, how does the president’s anterior insular cortex, the side of the brain that controls empathy, work? In a country where food inflation has completely depleted the income of almost everyone, it is unthinkable to have a presidency that thinks only in nouveau luxuries and superfluous acquisitions.

One thing is sure; the perilous presidential profligacy currently happening in Nigeria runs diametrically contrary to the “Renewed Hope” mantra of this administration. Everything smells of hypocrisy and intentional punishment of the people. There is no modicum of economic sense in anything they are doing. To them, Nigeria is a hybrid diary cow and beast of burden all at once; we are being milked without being fed while at the same time burdened with the task of providing for the comforts of our leaders.

Our country is dying, yet our presidency is basking in ostentation. It is hard to find a comparison anywhere in the world for what is becoming of this blessed country. Not even Venezuela, which has been trending for poor leadership, is as bad. With all its economic ill-fate, the country still boasts of a GDP per capita of $16,960. How does anyone even compare this to Nigeria’s $2,450 per capita?

Our benchmark in Africa used to be South Africa, but with their figure of $15,500 GDP per capita, it would be unfair, no, disrespectful, to bring Nigeria near in comparison. Our peers in Africa have suddenly become countries that hitherto trembled at the smell of our scent – the likes of Ghana with GDP per capita of $2,066; Burkina Faso with a GDP per capita of $ 2,440; Niger Republic with $1,330; Mali with $ 2,420, and the Benin Republic which costs $ 1,302.

Even Equatorial Guinea, the country which recently signed a gas pipeline agreement with Nigeria is head and shoulders above Nigeria. Their GDP per capita towers far above Nigeria’s at a height of $ 7,182.

How did we get here? The behaviour of our president makes one suspect there is a certain sense of entitlement to unmitigated expenditure as a reward for winning the last election. The president is enjoying himself. As we speak no one is sure of the fate of a certain yacht that was supposed to have also been procured to complete the pleasure of the president. Pending like that one is also the truth about how much he allows his lieutenants at the National Assembly to earn: they swear it’s just about a million naira per month, even when one of them in the lower chamber has insisted that he earns N21 million.

The sad thing is that the opportunity cost for the humongous expenditure invested to elevate Nigeria’s presidential vanity can solve many of the seemingly intractable problems choke-holding this nation. Just imagine that the N150 billion used to acquire this new flying toy of Mr. President’s is directed towards equipping, training, and motivating our security forces towards fighting the bandits that have made farming a risky practice in the northwest and most of Niger State? Try to visualise the economic difference that N3.4 billion would have made in rural access roads if they were not misprioritised for the enhanced comfort of the First Lady, the president’s wife.

From the comfort of his exquisitely renovated residence Vice President Kashim Shettima suggested the other day, that N8,000 was enough to change the life of a youth in Nigeria who knows what he is doing.

I think the VP is still living in the early 1980s when the price of a brand-new Peugeot 504 sedan was sold for between N7,800 and N9,200, or he, like former President Buhari, was in search of an excuse to describe our young people as “lazy yoots.”

Doesn’t VP Shettima know how many jobs can be created with the billions used to renovate his official residence? Does he not know how many shoe shiners can be trained to become shoe manufacturers with the N150 billion used to buy the new presidential jet?

How did we get here?

Just as Femi Adesina did when he “invented the word, “wailers,” I do not know if Bayo Onanuga has found time from his ethnic slurs to craft a name befitting those of us who have been moaning, mourning, and grouching about the horrors that have become leadership in Nigeria. I guess he should do this as quickly as possible because the ranks of the teary-eyed appear to be spreading.

We cannot even recognise Nigeria anymore!

• business a.m. commits to publishing a diversity of views, opinions and comments. It, therefore, welcomes your reaction to this and any of our articles via email: comment@businessamlive.com