Bola Tinubu

A member of the All Progressives Congress (APC), which reference works place at the centre to centre-left, he has been President of Nigeria since 29 May 2023, after serving as Governor of Lagos State from 1999 to 2007. He is the APC's candidate for President of Nigeria in the 2027 election.

Career

Tinubu studied business administration at Chicago State University, graduating in 1979, and worked as an accountant in the United States before joining Mobil Oil in the 1980s, where he reached senior executive level at Mobil Producing Nigeria. He was elected to the Senate for Lagos West in 1992, a seat that ended with the 1993 military annulment of the transition. He was Governor of Lagos State for two terms, from May 1999 to May 2007, and helped bring together the opposition parties that merged into the APC in 2013. He won the 2023 presidential election with 8,794,726 votes, or 36.6 per cent, ahead of Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, and was sworn in on 29 May 2023.

Positions

On taking office in 2023 Tinubu ended the fuel subsidy, which his government said cost Nigeria about $10 billion a year, and floated the naira, removing foreign-exchange restrictions. He replaced the central bank governor, Godwin Emefiele, in June 2023, and reshaped the military leadership, naming a civilian national security adviser. Wikipedia describes the APC's ideology as a big tent with social-conservative elements and a preference for controlled market policies. In 2024 he restored the older national anthem, "Nigeria, We Hail Thee".

Controversies

In 1993 a United States federal court in Illinois ordered the forfeiture of $460,000 from an account at First Heritage Bank operated by Tinubu, in a case in which US authorities alleged the funds were proceeds of narcotics trafficking, according to court documents reported by the ICIR in 2022. His campaign spokesperson Bayo Onanuga said the FBI never charged Tinubu with a drug offence, that the case never went to trial, that he was never convicted, and that the settlement of 15 September 1993 involved no admission of guilt. The matter was settled in 1993.

Summarised automatically from the linked sources. Wikipedia · Wikipedia · ICIR

Photo: Nosa Asemota, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons (cropped)