According to former governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State, Olusegun Obasanjo was Nigeria’s most successful president in terms of economic growth, job creation, and inflation rate.
As the fourth republic’s first president elected democratically, Obasanjo led Nigeria from 1999 to 2007.
At the time, according to Rufai, Nigeria resumed “proper integrated planning and we also got lucky.”.
“In Nigeria, we have a planning commission, but it has not been as successful. El-Rufai made this statement on Friday, September 15, during a session at the Africa In the World conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa.
“If you look at Nigeria’s economic trajectory, the most successful four to five years of economic growth, job creation, and lower inflation were the period of President Obasanjo’s second term in 2003 to 2007, when for the first time, the nation went back into proper integrated planning and we also got lucky,” he said.
“Oil prices started to increase, but we planned ahead so we didn’t waste the windfall. We had an excess crude account (ECA) based on a fiscal rule that directed surpluses over a specific benchmark crude oil price to that savings account.
We were able to pay off all of our foreign debt as a result.
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According to El-Rufai, Nigeria’s fiscal stability reached its peak in 2007, so when the global financial crisis hit in 2008, “Nigeria did not feel anything.”.
“Nothing was felt in Nigeria because we had a large savings account, huge reserves, and were able to absorb the shock without any internal issues, unlike most countries,” he said.
