As President Bola Tinubu marked his first year in office on Wednesday, his main challenger in the 2023 presidential poll former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar says Mr Tinubu’s dismal economic performance has bastardised the value of the naira.

The former vice-president said Mr Tinubu’s ill-preparedness for reform fallouts endangered the nation’s currency to not only drop in value but made it the worst performing currency in the world.

UK business newspaper Bloomberg had published a report earlier this month labelling the naira as the world’s worst performing currency weeks after the Central Bank of Nigeria’s governor Yemi Cardoso made boast that the naira was steadily making its way up the global market. 

“No thanks to Tinubu’s misguided policy, the naira’s value plummeted against the dollar and has since become the worst performing currency in the world,” Mr Abubakar said in a statement on Wednesday. 

He added that “inflationary pressure persists, and so does exchange rate volatility” despite Mr Tinubu’s hyped deployment of “various monetary policy tools” whose impact has yet to be felt even after 12 months.

According to the former vice-president, Mr Tinubu might have deluded himself into thinking his policies would be a grand success so much that he neglected to make contingency plans should the policies fail in achieving the anticipated outcomes.

“It is clear from the foregoing that President Tinubu has an exaggerated understanding of the efficacy of his policies and was not ready for the potential fallouts,” stated Mr Abubakar. “Tinubu and his team are not exactly sure of where the reform process is and what the next steps are. Has Nigeria reinstated fuel subsidy? 

Mr Abubakar added, “Is the naira on a free or managed float? These trial-and-error policies raise questions about the readiness of the administration and their capacity to restore the economy to a path of sustainable growth.”

Mr Abubakar’s words echoed the sentiments of ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo who said Mr Tinubu’s “wrongly implemented” policies have turned the nation to a laughing stock among global investors and driven current investors like Total Energy to move their monies to other African nations with better economic prospects.