Open Memo to His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, By Ahmed Aminu-Ramatu Yusuf

I advise Your Excellency to henceforth stop collecting foreign loans. We should do all within our power to pay-off the genuine foreign loans collected, expel IMF and WB officials monitoring our economy and finances in our ministries, departments, and agencies; fast-track our membership of the BRICS nations; and actively participate in its activities.

The purpose of this memorandum is to advise Your Excellency to embark on the development of our country in accordance with Chapter Two of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution.

Your Excellency is well aware that development incorporates modernisation, which creates unemployment, homelessness, poverty, hunger, diseases, crimes, and disorderliness. But, that development aims to tackle the problems of modernisation by improving the material conditions of the people; promoting their welfare benefits, ensuring people live better and in peace; accelerating the progress in people’s lives; guaranteeing the future of children; and bringing about a humane, disciplined, orderly and predictable society.

Accordingly, Your Excellency’s policies and practices should be inspired, informed and directed by the said Chapter Two of our Constitution. This suggests that Your Excellency should ensure that our country produces what we eat and eat what we produce; refine our raw materials, rather than exporting them; embark on all-round industrialisation instead of just consuming other nations’ goods; count on ourselves and do things for ourselves, rather than looking forward to others; and develop our home market, instead of being markets to other nations.

Your Excellency, Sir, by implementing Chapter Two, you will be modernising and developing our fractured, shattered, battered and tattered nation, as well as promoting creativity, patriotism, nationalism, federalism, nation-building, national integration, and Pan-Africanism.

Should your Excellency have no objection to paragraphs three and four above, I respectfully advise you to trim your cabinet, advisers and assistants. Nothing higher than a thirty seven-member Executive Council. For political purposes, I suggest you appoint grass-rooted, intelligent, and patriotic politicians, not self-centered, anti-democracy and anti-development politicians.

Please, Sir, avoid appointing any staff or product of foreign institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB), World Trade Organisation (WTO), and Western ‘donor’/’development’ organisations because their primary loyalty is to their employers, the West, and themselves, not Nigeria and Nigerians.

Your Excellency, Sir, I advise you appoint retired and serving civil and public servants, as well as critical scholars, professionals and media practitioners, with track record of performance, intelligence, discipline, daring and industry into your government. Please, completely avoid appointing praise-singers. In fact, distance yourself from all praise-singers, within and outside government. For praise-singing is the greatest obstacle to development and democracy.

I suggest Sir, you send some of our best brains in the civil and public services, as well as the academia, legal, media and other professions to critically study/learn from the Chinese experience on matters like state-building; qualitative, quantitative, cheap and efficient service delivery; regulatory enforcement; and poverty eradication.

Accordingly, I advise your Excellency to encourage, support and fund academic, professional, industrial and labour organisations to continuously criticise the policies and practices of all governments and their officials. Insist that as they criticise, they should also proffer solutions; and, please take their recommendations seriously.

Critical positions like Chief of Staff, Secretary to the Government of the Federation, National Security Adviser, Chief of Protocol, Principal and Private Secretaries, amongst others, are better handled by retired civil servants. The best Advisers come from critical intellectuals, media practitioners, and other professionals. By their training and practice, they are known to be tolerant, loyal to their nation, faithful to their masters, and eager to be part of history-making.

Your Excellency, I sincerely advice you to drastically cut down your foreign tours, and those of your Ministers and aides.The ‘Sokoto’ your government is looking for in the West and East is in your sokoto pocket; it is searching for what is not missing. Curb the wastages of state resources. Count, and depend on critical and industrious Nigerians, within and outside, to help you implement Chapter Two of our Constitution.

No nation will ever develop our country for us. We have no alternative than to do it ourselves. Of course, we should learn from others and even employ them, but only on the condition that they are ready to share their expertise and experiences with us.

Your Excellency, you can only successfully implement Chapter Two when you reorganise the civil and public services. Not by retrenching civil and public servants, but by, amongst other things, encouraging them to be critical thinkers, building their capacities, paying living wages/salaries, providing adequate better pension.

I suggest Sir, you send some of our best brains in the civil and public services, as well as the academia, legal, media and other professions to critically study/learn from the Chinese experience on matters like state-building; qualitative, quantitative, cheap and efficient service delivery; regulatory enforcement; and poverty eradication.

Thereafter, they should submit appropriate recommendations, which should take our culture, historicity, and specificity into consideration, for approval and necessary actions. This will be extremely cheaper, more productive and far more fruitful than what the best of IMF, WB, WTO, and other Western consultants will ever offer Nigeria.

Your Excellency, Sir, your devaluation and floating of the naira is one of the greatest disasters ever to be befall our country. Therefore, in the spirit of Chapter Two, undo this disaster. Sir, this can be undone, amongst others, by morally and scientifically valuing the naira; politically protecting it; and creating a self-reliant, self-dependent and self-propelling economy.

But, as you know, Sir, we cannot modernise, industrialise and develop without available, accessible, and affordable electricity. So I strongly advise you to electrify the entire nation, including the rural areas. You should, additionally, make electricity cheaply accessibl to all. For, electricity, as former Russian leader, Vladimir Lenin rightly pointed out, provides: “a link between town and country, will put an end to the division between town and country, will make it possible to raise the level of culture in the countryside and overcome, even in the most remotest corners of the land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease and barbarism.”

Accordingly, I advise, as I did before, that Your Excellency should: “completely de-privatise the power sector. Let the state, and the private sector, within and outside Nigeria, invest their finances and resources in the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity. Let all be subjected to the same rules, regulations and laws.” Thereafter, let free-competition and market forces, not private or state monopoly, fix electricity tariff.

Your Excellency, Sir, you should equally make petroleum products available, accessible and affordable. Accordingly, I strongly advise that State or private monopoly should be discouraged, resisted and combated. This implies that the “illegal” modular petroleum refineries all over the Niger Delta be legalised, regularised and standardised. Make it extremely simple and cheap for Nigerians and non-Nigerians to establish refineries. But, under no circumstances should regulations and standards be compromised.

Your Excellency, Sir, you know better than I do, that the currency of a nation is not just an economic issue. It is an issue of national identity, an important symbol which unites a people, and, if it is grounded and valued, brings respectability, intimidates others, and repels “see-me-finish” from other nations. It is a peoples’ dignity, sovereignty, and independence.

Your Excellency, Sir, your devaluation and floating of the naira is one of the greatest disasters ever to be befall our country. Therefore, in the spirit of Chapter Two, undo this disaster. Sir, this can be undone, amongst others, by morally and scientifically valuing the naira; politically protecting it; and creating a self-reliant, self-dependent and self-propelling economy.

Accordingly, I advise Your Excellency to henceforth stop collecting foreign loans. We should do all within our power to pay-off the genuine foreign loans collected, expel IMF and WB officials monitoring our economy and finances in our ministries, departments, and agencies; fast-track our membership of the BRICS nations; and actively participate in its activities.

Finally, Your Excellency, in pursuing development, consult with society, especially the industrial, labour, academic, professional, trade and artisan organisations. But equally engage the National Assembly, as well as legislators and executives at the state level.

Thank you, Sir. GOD bless Nigeria.

Ahmed Aminu-Ramatu Yusuf worked as deputy director, Cabinet Affairs Office, The Presidency, and retired as General Manager (Administration), Nigerian Meteorological Agency, (NiMet). Email: aaramatuyusuf@yahoo.com