Former vice president and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2023 elections, Atiku Abubakar, has said his reforms would have “benefited from more adequate preparations” and “more sufficient diagnostic assessment of the country’s conditions” if he was elected Nigerian president.
Abubakar, through a post on his X account on Sunday, said his policy reforms would have “protected our fragile economy against a much deeper crisis by preventing business collapse”.
The PDP chieftain knocked President Bola Tinubu’s administration for removing the petrol subsidy, floating the exchange rate, and increasing the electricity tariff, calling it “overkill”.
Abubakar also said he would have led “by example” and “first eliminate revenue leakages arising from governance, including the cost of running the government and the government procurement process”.
The former vice president added that his administration would have “adopted alternative approaches to conflict resolution such as diplomacy, intelligence, improved border control, deploying traditional institutions, and good neighbourliness”.
He said that he would have instituted an economic stimulus fund (ESF) “with an initial investment capacity of approximately US$10 billion to support MSMEs across all economic sectors”.
Abubakar said albeit he advocated for the removal of petrol subsidy, his government would have adopted “a gradualist approach” to the execution of the reforms.
“Subsidies would not have been removed suddenly and completely. It is instructive that when I was Vice President, we adopted a gradualist approach and had completed phases 1 and 2 of the reform before our tenure ended,” he wrote.
The former vice president said his administration would have a “managed-floating system” of foreign exchange.
“A fixed exchange rate system was out of the question because it would not be in line with our philosophy of running an open, private sector-friendly economy,” he said.
“On the other hand, given Nigeria’s underlying economic conditions, adopting a floating exchange rate system would be an overkill.
“We would have encouraged our central bank to adopt a gradualist approach to FX management. A managed-floating system would have been a preferred option.”