19th October, 2022
By Alaba-Olusola Oke
Dr Abiola Oshodi, a leading chieftain of All Progressives Congress (APC), said Nigeria needs a financial expert like Bola Tinubu as its next president.
He opined in a statement issued by Mr Adebola Olowo, his Media Assistant, on Tuesday in Akure.
Oshodi noted that Tinubu, as Lagos governor between 1999 and 2007, significantly increased the state’s revenue and laid the foundation for its current financial stability.
According to him, voting Tinubu as the president in 2023 would address the financial challenges that Nigeria was currently facing.
He explained that the country’s increasing debt profile, occasioned by a low collection of revenue, was worrisome and must be tamed by the country’s next president, hence the need for the electorate to vote for Tinubu.
“This is the same revenue problem that Sen. Tinubu met in Lagos when he assumed office as the governor of the state, a challenge that he promptly dealt with and if elected and sworn in by May 29, 2023, he would also meet a revenue problem and he would be expected to deal with it,” he said.
Reiterating President Muhammadu Buhari’s statement during the presentation of the 2023 budget, he affirmed that Nigeria’s debt service to revenue ratio needed close attention.
Oshodi said that although the Minister of Finance, Mrs Zainab Ahmed, had clarified that Nigeria did not have a debt problem as it had yet to exceed its self-imposed ceiling debt of GDP to debt of 40 per cent, she had repeatedly said that Nigeria had indeed a revenue problem.
“Of all the 18 illustrious Nigerians vying to be Nigeria’s next president, Sen. Tinubu stands out due to his hands-on experience and his impressive stewardship, successfully piloting the affairs of the smallest but the most commercialised among Nigeria’s 36 states.
“When Sen. Tinubu assumed office in 1999, the Lagos State Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) was said to be a paltry N600 million per month.
“Today, because of the restructuring, innovativeness and the necessary policies and strategies that he took which successive governors, his mentees, built on, the Lagos State annual IGR is now N753 billion according to the latest figures by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS),” he stated.
“Due to the structures laid in the eight years of the Tinubu-led administration, Lagos has become, among other things, Nigeria’s financial hub, hosting more than 50 per cent of Nigeria’s financial institutions and even with its Gross Domestic Product( GDP) accounting for 26.7 per cent of Nigeria’s GDP and more than 50 of non-oil GDP,” he stated.