Unpacking Kingsley Moghalu Purported Unsettling Of Tinubu By Wale Alonge

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By Wale Alonge

As In the case with Nigerian social media, hating on Tinubu and Monday morning quarterbacking of his policy has become a cottage industry. Even the position of people including his sons in the greeting line for the Emir of Quatar can set Nigerian social media on fire with the like of Abati and his Arise clowns making rating hay with it. So it is no surprise that the speech by Kingsley Moghalu comes with a deceptive and misleading headline “Kingsley Moghalu Ubsettles Tinubu in Speech” when in fact he was almost apologetic in stating that his position was without recrimination against the president. He in fact went back to the beginning of the republic and how our performance since independence compared to other comparative nations was subpar and a huge disgrace. So this notion that he took to President to the woodshed can only be in the warped imagination of Tinubu haters. Watch the video yourself and let’s unpack its content. . Frankly, there was nothing revelatory, revolutionary nor innovative in give it to him Kingsley’s wel delivered polished presentation. There was nothing new other than the same old regurgitation of the economic miracle of Singapore, Japan and the U.S. Of course and predictably, he engages in a whole lot of Monday morning quarterbacking about the appropriate manner and timing to remove the destructive fuel subsidy and the floating of the Naira. He wanted Tinubu to set up mass transit system across the length and breath of Nigeria before the removal of the fuel subsidy something the country has not been able to do in sixty plus years of her independence on in her decapitated road and rail infrastructure. An absolute non-starter policy prescription that would have put a death knell or fuel subsidy removal.

For how many decades have previous presidents talked about removing fuel subsidy only to back out due to lack of political backbone to pull the trigger. No matter what Tinubu did, removing the kleptocratic fuel subsidy scheme was going to generate pain. Teleguiding entrenched power who have profited stupendously at our collective expense, from the insane fuel subsidy scheme about plan to wipe it off would have killed it. People forgot that Sister Ngozi’s mother was kidnapped by the fuel subsidy Mafia on account of the fuel subsidy removal.

There is also no question about it that flooding the economy with cheap Naira with the maddening way and mean scheme of Emefiele and Buhari, and illegally allocating scarce dollars to fat cat and klepto-preneurs to sell and profiteer in the black market, was bound to crash our currency and lead to a rush for scarce dollars:

That does not take a genius to figure out. Tinubu had a choice to to continue treating the economic cancer that was ravaging our country with a band-aid or inflict the painful but necessary chemotherapy that was bound to cause us tremendous pain and the loss of our hairs. It took courage for him to pull the trigger, but if we endure and survive the painful round of chemotherapy, we stand a chance of coming out strong and more virile on the other side. The trick for the Tinubu regime is to carefully calibrate the dose of the chemotherapy so its toxicity doesn’t kill the patient. That is the struggle he and his team are grappling with right now even as the patient they are trying to safe is yelling for band-aid on his malignant sore. Kingsley also made a lot of noise about technocratic cabinet forgetting that Tinubu is a politician who doesn’t want to become a one-term president. He knows full well his constituency and those whose support was critical for his electoral victory. Does anyone think Wike who played a decisive role in tanking Atiku’s presidential dream and in the process supported Tinubu’s victory would not get a cabinet position and that a so-called technocrat who didn’t sow into his campaign would be rewarded with a cabinet post? That is political idiocy at its worst. President Obasanjo’s political constituency was the military who handed power over to him in 1999. He didn’t even win his own polling boot and yet he became president. He therefore had more leeway in constituting his cabinet which had a fair amount of technocrats. Even with the technocrats in his cabinet, mind you he still has a fair amount of politicians, what was their scorecard? No doubt Sister Ngozi helped with debt relief from our multilateral debtors, but as brilliant as these eminently qualified technocrats were like our dear sister Ngozi, their effort were hampered by our retrogressive, dysfunctional political system. Have we forgotten that Sister Ngozi’s mother was kidnapped for good measure to send the message that the system was going to have its way. For years she advocated unsuccessfully for the removal of the fuel subsidies and the stocking up of a rainy day sovereign wealth from the huge petrol dollars that was flowing in during the Jonathan regime. Didn’t Jonathan’s technocratic cabinet give us kleptomaniac oil minister Madueke?

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So Kingley’s self serving advocacy of a technocratic cabinet has not always panned out for our country. To be fair, Tinubu has a fair balance between politicians and technocrats and between youthful energy and seasoned politicians in his cabinet. That is just the fact. The problem most time in our government is not about personalities and sometimes not even competence, but the corrosive, dysfunctional system we have institutionalized including our culturally,-incompatible, high cost, top heavy, klunky plagiarized American presidential constitution. Add on top of that disaster, our destructive, kleptocratic and retrogressive civil service.

Yet, in his speech, Kingley was dripping with effusive worship of Americana, of its history and constitution, totally oblivious of our peculiar history of colonialism, our mind-numbing ethnocentrism, our tribal animus and our path to independence which was totally different from the U.S. While American founding fathers were in unison about independence, many of the northern political leaders were in fact not desirous of it. So we started our journey to independence on a discordant, ethnocentric advantage/seeking note and nothing has changed ever since. . Kingsley was therefore correct in noting that we are still a nation without a coherent national identity but a patchwork of antagonistic ethnic enclaves engaged in a pig’s pen gluttonous scramble for hegemonic power advantage and domination.

Yet, rather than advocate for our home grown constitution, for massive structural deconstruction and reconstitution and a self determinant economic pathway, Kingsley urged President Tinubu to adopt hook, line and sinker the economic blueprint of the African Business Roundtable which coincidentally he chaired. Talk about plugging yourself. He even held out a book like a salesman.

Election and political patronage goes hand in hand. That is the nature of the beast all over the world. The solution is for the Nigerian educated technocratic class to jump into the political arena and not leave our politics in the hands of the worst of us. You cannot expect to reap where you have not sown.

So the headline about Kingsley taking Tinubu to the woodshed or making him restless is misleading and reflective of the constant baggering of his presidency by those who cannot get over the fact that he beat them fair and square in a closely contested election .

Wale Alonge