Nasir el-Rufai, the former governor of Kaduna State, claimed on Friday that President Olusegun Obasanjo’s second term, from 2003 to 2007, was the best economic tenure in Nigeria’s democratic history.
El-Rufai, who controversially turned down a ministerial position in President Bola Tinubu’s cabinet, backed up his claims by saying that the country was largely unaffected by the 2008 Global Financial Crisis due to Mr Obasanjo’s policies.
“For the first time, the country went back into proper integrated planning and we also got lucky,” el-Rufai said at the Africa in the World conference in South Africa.
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According to el-Rufai, this time corresponded to the oil boom of the 2000s, and Olusegun Obasanjo’s government was able to build such a robust fiscal health by 2007.
This was in stark contrast to 2016, just under nine years later, when the decline in oil prices in 2015 pushed the country into a recession, threatening to cripple economic activity across the entire nation.
“If you look at Nigeria’s economic trajectory, the most successful four to five-year period of economic growth, job creation, and reduced inflation was the period of the second term of President Obasanjo in 2003 to 2007,”
“Nothing was felt in Nigeria because Nigeria had a big savings account,” he continued, remarking on the 2008 worldwide economic crisis.
