OPINION:
By Prince Justice Faloye
Nigerians in poverty, increased to two-thirds due to President Tinubu’s Neoliberal economic reforms of fuel subsidies removal and devaluation. Peter Obi also shares the same ideology, claiming the increased poverty is due to Tinubu’s poor handling, despite the global evidence that neoliberal economics breeds poverty and income inequality. They both ignore Chapter 2 of the Constitution and the global truism that the government’s sole responsibility is to subsidize life.
Citizens come together to handover their commonwealth to an authority in a social contract to benefit from economies of scale. Unfortunately for fifty years, the basis of social contracts has been attacked with fallacies of non-existent free market models to push neoliberalism that brought poverty. Nigerians need a party that understands the economics of subsidies and politics of social contracts, promising both production subsidies like fuel subsidy and subsidies in education, health, employment, housing etc, like every economically advancing nation does.
Despite wrong claims that neoliberalism is true economics based on natural laws, it has failed woefully compared to social democracies with economic welfarism like Germany, Sweden and other Nordic countries that rank the highest on global quality of life indexes. Tinubu, Obi and Atiku failed to realize that the $10b fuel subsidy had huge income and employment multiplier effects across the economy and its withdrawal shrunk the economy several fold while devaluation devalued real wages. Their teachers taught them nonsense like Fela sung!
The Indigenous African civilization that evolved in abundance, where one man can’t cut an Iroko tree on his own, our economic ideology is Afenifere/Ubuntu – the belief that an economy grows when we come together to uplift everyone, based on the simple understanding of income and employment multiplier effects across the economy when you subsidize. However in Eurasian wildernesses where a few had to take control of water, food and scare resources to survive, a few overexploited the majority through religious feudalism before evolving to global imperialism
The Western Civilization Religious feudalism, built on exploitation by landowners and church subsidies, evolved with the Pope Alexander VI June 7 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which substitute White peasants exploitation for that of Africans and South Americans. Whites were subsidized with African slavery to build the slave plantation economic system for over 300 years after which came African colonization that a smaller percentage of Whites enjoyed direct benefits through exploitative exports and imports which trickled down to their masses.
Following the global colonial war known as the First World War, the masses of Russia, without African colonies to subsidize its people, rose in socialist revolutions, forcing the government to subsidize life. To avoid the socialist revolution spreading to Western Europe and North America, their governments from 1930 to 1970s introduced economic welfarism with subsidies in food, housing, education, housing etc, which brought the greatest generational wealth transfer ever.
It was the transformative effects of subsidies that made leaders of newly independent Black nation, like Awolowo to adopt free education and healthcare, massive social housing and production subsidies to economically transform the Western region. This Sixties Black economic liberation provoked the fight-back from the mid Seventies by racist Capitalists, with neoliberalism propounded by Chicago School of Economics Professor Milton Friedman, pushed led by US President Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, initially to reenslave both the Black Disapora and Subsaharan Africans but later affecting poor white workers.
Despite neoliberals trying to stop economic welfarism at home, US still spends over a trillion dollars, UK half a trillion, due to strong democratic resistance, unlike in Africa with poor electoral systems where neoliberal poverty prevails. IMF and the World Bank were used to force the illogical neoliberal economic ideology across the Black Race. Neoliberalism favors only a select few, the poor blame other tribes and breeds ethnic conflict from Nigerian prebendalists to South African xenophobia, so it brought both economic and political destabilization.
Neoliberalism over the last fifty years became the prevalent worldview especially in the English speaking world pushed by Western puppet neoliberal politicians, backed by private owner media, Western funded academia and CIA induced Pentecostalism prosperity theology to replace liberation theology of the likes of Martin Luther King and South American Catholics. Islamic mercenaries were also used for political destabilization to bring neoliberals like APC into power.
In Nigeria, General Obasanjo started with the removal of education subsidies leading to the infamous Ali Must Go protests. General Ibrahim Babaginda introduced the full neoliberal economic ideology, which ordinarily would have provoked protests but student and labor union powers were broken. Neoliberalism has an accounting perspective constrained to yearly accounts that ignores historic costs that Economists calculate. Tinubu now boasts on 2026 mere 4% growth, forgetting the 50% fall in 2023/2024 GDP when he introduced his excruciating neoliberal policies, not to talk of three hundred years of slavery and colonization exploitation that needs subsidies to redress, especially in income, education, health, transport and housing.
Awolowo and his Afenifere pushed Social Democratic economic welfarism virtues through Action Group in the Fifties and Sixties, Unity Party of Nigeria between 1979 and 1983, and Alliance for Democracy and Social Democratic Party since 1999. For the 2027 presidential election, Social Democratic Party Prince Adewole Adebayo is the only true ideological opposite of Tinubu, Peter Obi and Abubakar Atiku. Distracted by ethnic and personality politics, many fail to see that the SDP is the Subsidies Disbursing Party to deliver prosperity and abundance for all.
Prince Justice Faloye is the President, ASHE FOUNDATION, National Publicity Secretary, Afenifere.
