Anambra State Governor, Charles Soludo, says the administration of President Bola Tinubu inherited a “dead economy” from past administrations.

Soludo, a former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), said Tinubu’s government inherited a “dead horse that was seen standing”, noting that Nigerians were unaware that the country’s economy was “dead”.

The governor said this during an interview on Channels TV’s programme, Politics Today, on Thursday night.

Governor Soludo, who blamed Nigeria’s economic woes on past violations of the CBN’s establishment law, said the apex bank failed to comply with the 2007 CBN Act.

He further accused the CBN under past management of illegally granting trillions of naira in unbacked financing despite legal restrictions, which he said contributed to the current woes.

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Soludo said: “We explicitly put into the law that you can’t grant the federal government more than five per cent of the previous year’s actual revenue. And that so granted must be retired by the end of the year in which it was granted.

“When the federal government fails to retire, the Central Bank is forbidden by that law from further advancing ways and means. That was the law 2007 Act of the Central Bank.

“But we sat all of us Nigerians watching the CBN illegally and brazenly violating that Act year on year and kept on printing money. That is when advance money is backed by nothing; you just credit the federal government with trillions; N4 trillion, N10 trillion, N15 trillion, and we keep going.

“I said it before. This particular government inherited a dead economy from a microeconomic point of view. This government inherited a dead horse that was seen standing but people didn’t know that it was dead. I think it’s important for Nigerians to understand this.”

The National Security Adviser (NSA), Nuhu Ribadu, had, on November 13, said the past administration, led by former President Muhammadu Buhari, bankrupted Nigeria.

Ribadu stressed that Tinubu’s administration inherited a “bankrupt country”.

The Star