Prince Adewole Adebayo
By Akeem Atoyebi
At the J9 Collective 13th anniversary lecture, former Social Democratic Party (SDP) presidential candidate, Prince Adewole Adebayo, a lawyer and successful business man titillated the audience with his brilliant insights into the conundrum called Easy of Doing Business in the country.
Adebayo In a video made available to NATIONAL WAVES, noted that the notion of ease of doing business has never really led to any practical good end, but is just a mere sloganeering.
According to him, there can never be a successful ease of doing business if the government fails to ensure a genuine fiscal and monetary reforms of the economy.
He noted that right from the Balewa era, there has never been a genuine reforms. What could have been a genuine fiscal reform was during the civil war when Chief Obafemi Awolowo was finance minister.
He gave an apocryphal story of Awolowo’s successor Shehu Shagari who happened to be at a place where crude oil was being loaded into a ship. Upon enquiry about the amount and volume and how it was measured, the officials told him that they would look at the weight of the ship, but that the former minister ( Awolowo’) had given directive that it be metered.
Adebayo noted that before Shagari died, he had numerous sessions with him, adding that through out Shagari era , Awolowo’s metering directive was not carried out
Adebayo averred that there can never be a genuine monetary reforms without fiscal reform. Unfortunately, those in authorities are not ready to embark on fiscal reform because of vested interests in the status quo.
Those in charge of monetary reforms he says are not even genuine economists, citing the case of the Tinubu predecessor in office, the only scapegoat being the former Central Bank governor. He said any rebating of naira that leads the currency to effectively loses its power to store value is economic brigandage and the people behind it should be behind bar in a normal, saner clime.
Adebayo in a tour de force gave a brilliant analysis of the challenges that clog having a successful ease of doing business.
