Much has been made of the recent debut media chat of President Tinubu, with scant attention paid to his disastrous free market prescription. The media chat, which appeared to have been scripted, depicted him as a president out of his depth on many issues, including his assertion on price controls:

“Sorry, I don’t believe in price control. I believe in a free market economy… We should first continue to supply the market to bring down prices... It is a question of demand and supply”. His assertion, which expands the position he articulated in Riyadh a few weeks ago, “I believe in the full application of free market economy. Your money will flow easily in and easily out. The arbitrage around our nation’s foreign exchange policy regime and the corruption that was associated with it is also gone” is problematic given our social and economic realities. 

The benefits of the free market, such as efficiency, competition and innovation, eviscerated the arguments of the left in the 1980s and 1990s and made the renowned Canadian author Naomi Klein proclaim with glee in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, that free market had captured the final frontiers, have today given way to doubts as unchecked liberalisation spawns distortions and manipulations everywhere while creating social and moral problems. 

The consensual politics of the past on the imperatives of a free market has since collapsed, and the neoliberal orthodoxy of Thatcherism and Reaganism, which rolled back the state for many years, is now stuck in reverse. Several political parties opposed to an unrestricted free market in the United States and Canada have become counterpoints to the so-called captured final frontiers. Even inside the Republican Party, home of Reaganism, “Trump’s opposition to free trade sets the Republican Party on a perilous path”, argues the American economist Phil Levy in his seminal for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, ‘Is the GOP still the party of free trade?’.

There is evidence, too, of British politicians abandoning neoliberal orthodoxy. 

The renationalisation of British Rail, as are Bulb Energy and Sheffield Forgemasters, highlights the ideological shifts in contemporary British politics and the growing party political opposition to Thatcherism- even right inside the Conservative Party, which recently screamed: “we do not believe in untrammelled free market”. 

So, why is President Tinubu pushing for an untrammelled free market at a time when Western politicians, the natural heirs of Adam Smith, are walking away from the orthodoxy of neoliberalism? My answer is simply this: the politics of governance responds to the economic realities that produce the greatest number of poor citizens whose breads are not buttered by Adam Smith’s invisible hand in societies that protect the right of citizens to either renew leaders’ mandates or throw them out of power. 

This right undergirds the social contract between citizens and their leaders and reinforces the principle that power ultimately resides with the citizens. The recognition of this principle embedded in constitutional frameworks underscores Western political culture. 

This is not the case here, where the invisible hand serves the corrupt interests of politicians who consider governance to be the pursuit of opaque interests. President Tinubu, knowing his history, is a perversion of the Smithsonian’s invisible hand. One only has to look at Lagos’s governance politics, perpetually rigged to serve a corrupt political elite. This is where extractive politics driven by corruption poses the greatest challenge to the free market, heightening the dynamic between unchecked power and corruption. President Tinubu’s free market, a prescription for death, without price controls’ safeguards and concerning social protection that prevents the market from being inequitable, comes within that dynamic between unchecked power and corruption. 

Doubtless, his free-market prescription reveals a certain cunning practice of accumulation by dispossession that has dogged his entire political career. By accumulation by dispossession, a term borrowed from the scholar David Harvey, which Rosa Luxemburg correctly described as “spheres of interest… displayed without any attempt at concealment”, I mean the criminal accusation of public properties and their conversion into exclusive property rights. This is how the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) clarified it in one of its reports last year: “Tinubu’s history is not entirely clean… OCCRP has uncovered more than a dozen other properties with links to Tinubu, mostly acquired while he served as Lagos State’s governor from May 1999 to May 2007”. An unverified media report also has it that “Tinubu’s residence at 26 Bourdillion Road, Ikoyi was initially falsely presented as Oando PLC Guest House. Later, he purportedly bought it from Oando and used public funds to rebuild and renovate it. The Lagos State government bought the property and paid an undisclosed sum to him and thereafter gave the property back to him shortly before he left office in 2007”. 

One thing clear here is that endless accumulation by dispossession, which “requires endless accumulation of political power”, repurposes the state that it becomes the promoter and protector of private interests. The principles of the free market cannot truly thrive in such a repurposed state manipulated by a president who writes his economic policies in prose and masks his entitlements with complex tropes of poetry, only him and his cronies; and perhaps, “a firm where his hold stakes through a crony”, according to a BBC News report, can make sense of. 

Those who survived Buhari’s yoke for eight years and are trying to make sense of the invisible hand of Tinubu’s free market will invariably make sense of their conditions the hard way. If you are in doubt, dear reader, ask Citizen X, who, Tinubu claimed in his media chat, dumped his Rolls Royce for the Honda saloon car. The context here is that the present, rather than the past, offers a cautionary tale that lays bare the risk of an unregulated free market in a fragile economy. 

Context no longer matters to the women and children who died recently in the Ibadan, Okija and Abuja Christmas food stampedes. Still, for a living, there are rising food prices, slave wages, despair and hopelessness to deal with. If President Tinubu’s free market continues to ignore these realities, he risks hurting our country and ruining it. 

That there is the disaster Tinubu preaches as a free market!