Former presidential candidate on the Social Democratic Party platform, Adewole Adebayo, says the economy was haphazardly managed by former President Muhammadu Buhari. He, however, praised his successor, Bola Tinubu, for his handling of the country’s economic crisis.

In a Channels TV interview on Tuesday, Mr Adebayo likened the economy to an emergency room patient currently being diagnosed by Mr Tinubu.

“It’s obvious that the economy that President Buhari left was a poorly managed economy, and was an emergency room patient,” the politician said. “Like any emergency room patient, the road to recovery will be a good diagnosis by the doctor. So if the doctor is able to know what is the reason why you are ill, he will be able to put you on a solid path to recovery.”

“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. He hasn’t been able to identify the problem, the ailment that is disturbing the patient, but as an emergency room doctor, he is taking some steps, some of which actually aggravated the case of the patient,” he added.

The politician noted that some improvement is evident in one or two sectors, but this should not deceive Nigerians into thinking that the economy is on its road to full recovery.

Mr Adebayo described the president as a serial tax collector, stating that even though the present reform might not be the best, it is better than what it used to be.

“Everybody knows that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a well-known tax collector. But that tax collection is an improvement over a disorganised system he met on the ground. He did tax collection in Lagos and he came to do tax collection in Abuja. This reform is not the best but is far better than what we had.”