Good news came the way of the main opposition party, Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, as a leading world media group has given the 2019 presidential election to it. The Economist Intelligence Unit, EIU, the research unit of The Economist Magazine, has predicted that the opposition PDP will defeat the ruling All Progressives Congress APC candidate in the upcoming 2019 presidential election.
EIU stated this in its latest country forecast overview on Nigeria that was published last week. In it, the paper offered a range of reasons for its prediction. The magazine equally stated that it will be a close call but concluded anyway that the opposition PDP would win the election. The paper predicted slowdown in economic activities in Nigeria as politics takes centre stage, which is normal. The Economist’s prediction somehow tallies with another intelligence report conducted by a multinational banking and financial services company, HSBC, which said a second term for President Muhammadu Buhari would gravely impair the economic development of the country.
Probably this forecast explains why so many aspirants emerged in PDP. going into their primaries, 13 people picked up the N12 million presidential nomination forms, the Board of Trustees, BoT of the party who tried to mediate to midwife a consensus arrangement failed. Although going through the consensus arrangement could have minimised post primary conflict; however, consensus does not really assure all stakeholders of a sense of fairness. It normally looks like it’s a pre-determined end that seeks for validation.
The London-based magazine, which also anticipated a depreciation of the naira, said further in its assessment that Buhari was fast shedding support from within the APC with governors and lawmakers defecting to the opposition en mass. “Intra-party politics would be chaotic ahead of the poll and we ultimately expect the incumbent to lose power,” it said.
According to the magazine, “The 2019 elections will be a close contest between the ruling APC and the PDP. We expect the PDP presidential candidate to win, but for the next administration to flounder against the same problems as the incumbent one. “The next government is likely to be led by the PDP, the main opposition, potentially in a coalition with smaller parties, but instability will remain an insoluble challenge. “Internally, not all ambitious politicians from the APC who have defected will be rewarded with places in the next government; or if they are, it will mean that pre-existing grandees within the PDP will have been sidelined.
“Whoever ends up feeling cheated will eventually turn on the new administration, as is happening to the APC now. There is also a unifying PDP presidential candidate, with around 16 aspirants competing for the nomination. A weak APC before the election and a troubled government thereafter implies that Nigeria’s manifold security threats will continue to fester. Parliamentary rifts will remain the main problem, and this applies no matter who is in charge, given competing priorities between representatives from different regions and the absence of a common ideology within parties.”
Continuing, it noted that policy reforms, particularly in the vital oil industry would be slow as a result of division in the political elite between advocates of tough, unpopular market reforms and those who refer pandering to nationalistic and pro-subsidy interest groups. The latter group was likely to remain in the ascendancy, it added. According to the EIU, politicisation of economic policy would also slow reforms and at times actively decelerate economic growth.
“The Central Bank of Nigeria will not act completely independently, and the overall policy agenda will be pulled in differing directions by various powerful interest groups,” the report stated. Fiscal expenditure will remain dominant by recurrent spending despite attempts to boost capital investments. Efforts to boost non-oil tax revenue will be constraint by weak bureaucratic capacity and low economic growth. Constrained by a crippling infrastructure deficit, economic growth will be well beneath level needed to boost job creation and increasing living standard.
“Inflation will generally remain high over the forecast period (2018-2022) amid expansionary fiscal policy and high food prices stemming from government efforts to limit import and support local producers.
“The authorities will continue to interfere in the foreign exchange market although the degree of interference should eventually lessen with higher oil prices supporting reserves and broad economic confidence slowly improving. The naira will nonetheless depreciate over 2019-21 and be broadly stable in 2022,” the report explained. The above among others form the basis for their forecast.
We urge PDP to be cautiously optimistic. While it is indeed possible to defeat APC, there is a lot of work to be done. Not necessarily based on some of the issues raised by the magazine but on the peculiarities of the Nigerian environment. The PDP and whoever emerges their presidential candidate must proceed with tact by using these issues as talking points during campaigns and not to overtly rely on them and go home to sleep.
