The Social Democratic Party (SDP) presidential candidate in the 2023 elections, Adewole Adebayo, has said President Bola Tinubu has managed to stabilise Nigeria’s economy, which he described as poorly run under former President Muhammadu Buhari.
Speaking on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Tuesday, Adebayo likened the economy Buhari left behind to “an emergency room patient,” saying Tinubu has at least kept it from collapsing.
“It’s obvious that the economy that President Buhari left was a poorly managed economy, and was an emergency room patient,” he said.
“What President Tinubu has done is to stabilise the patient, but I’m not sure that he has managed to know the ailment. So the patient is not going to die imminently, but he hasn’t found a cure.”
The opposition politician argued that while Tinubu has made progress in certain sectors, he has yet to diagnose Nigeria’s fundamental economic problems.
“He hasn’t been able to identify the problem, the ailment that is disturbing the patient,” he noted.
“As an emergency room doctor, he is taking some steps, some of it actually aggravated the case of the patient, but over time, he appears to have one or two wins in two sectors.”
Adebayo also described Tinubu as “a well-known tax collector,” pointing to his record in Lagos and his current push for tax reforms at the federal level.
“Everybody knows that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a well-known tax collector. He did tax collection in Lagos and he came to do tax collection in Abuja,” he said.
In June, Tinubu signed four major tax reform bills into law, aimed at overhauling Nigeria’s tax system, simplifying collection, and easing the burden on low-income earners and small businesses. The new laws take effect from January 1, 2026.
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