Uzodimma incorrectly compares Tinubu to Lee Kuan Yew. Nigeria’s president is not even close
GOVERNOR of Imo State, Mr Hope Uzodimma, has incorrectly likened President Bola Tinubu to the founding Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, saying the Nigerian leader is laying the foundation for a similar economic transformation through sweeping reforms.
According to a statement issued on Saturday by Tunde Rahman, Director of Media and Publicity of the Renewed Hope Ambassadors, Uzodimma said Tinubu’s economic policies would not only reposition the country but also secure him a second term in the 2027 presidential election.
The governor made the remarks on Friday during a state dinner at the Imo Government House, held to conclude a three-day media inspection tour organised by the Renewed Hope Ambassadors in partnership with the presidential communications team.
“In President Bola Tinubu, we have another Lee Kuan Yew,” Uzodimma said, praising the president for taking office with a clear vision to tackle Nigeria’s economic problems through decisive reforms.
He said Tinubu wasted no time in introducing difficult but necessary measures, insisting that the administration understood the depth of the country’s challenges from the outset.
READ ALSO: Reforms vs reality: Tinubu gets global praise, faces outrage at home
“The old order is gone and there is now a new order. President Tinubu knew exactly what he came to do,” he said.
“He started implementing the reforms immediately because he understood the task before him.”
The statement said the governor compared Nigeria’s economic condition before the reforms to the biblical Israelites’ captivity in Egypt, arguing that just as their freedom required a difficult journey, Nigeria also needed bold and painful decisions to break free from years of economic stagnation.
Uzodimma acknowledged that the reforms initially imposed hardship on Nigerians but maintained they were beginning to produce tangible gains. He said higher revenues accruing to state governments had strengthened investments in infrastructure and human capital development.
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Why Tinubu isn’t Lee Kuan Yew
President Tinubu embarked on petrol and foreign exchange(FX) reforms 3 years ago, liberalising both sectors. He introduced new tax reforms on January 1, 2026. With these reforms, the Nigerian government now earns more money, while plugging leakages in the economy.
However, poverty has skyrocketed, with the government of Tinubu doing little to arrest the situation. Citizens now pay more taxes with little to show for it, especially at states and local government levels.
Tinubu isn’t Lee Kuan Yew by any stretch of imagination. Yew, Singapore’s founding prime minister, transformed the nation from an impoverished, resource-poor colonial outpost into a wealthy global powerhouse between 1959 and 1990. He achieved this rapid economic leap by prioritising foreign investment, rigorous anti-corruption laws, educational meritocracy, and massive public housing initiatives, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Former Dean of Insead, Professor Ilian Milhov, explained Yew’s level of transformation in Singapore. According to him, Yew performed a miracle transforming Singapore from one of the poorest countries in the world in the 1960s to being among the most advanced today.
“His main contribution, and the key to his success, was that he understood that in order to put Singapore on a sustainable growth trajectory one needs much more than sound economic policy,” he wrote in the BBC.
Yew tranformed Singapore for over 30 years, but Nigeria’s Tinubu is just 3 years in office and won’t stay there for more than 8 years. So, there is even no basis for comparison. Right now, Nigerians are worse-off owing to Tinubu’s half thought-out economic policies, which have increased the level of poverty in the nation. According to a World Bank 2025 report, the share of Nigerians living below the poverty line increased from 56 percent in 2023 to 61 percent in 2024, before rising further to 63 percent in 2025—equivalent to about 140 million people.
READ ALSO: Onanuga says Tinubu’s reforms yielding dividends but facts contradict his claim
Chief Executive Officer, The Motley Fool Singapore, Mr David Kuo, said Yew’s vision was to build an economically sound country that would be robust enough for future generations. But he knew Singapore had limitations.
“To achieve his dream, he had to change the mindset of its then population of around two million people. Singaporeans had to be more welcoming to immigrants if the country were to grow,” he wrote in the BBC.
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“The population needed to expand by continually attracting high-calibre people who would create employment, bring in much-needed capital and most importantly, pass on their key skills.”
That is, unfortunately, not happening in Nigeria. The efforts to attract foreign investments to Nigeria are even debatable, with the poor electricity supply, near-absence of the rule of law, and protection of the corrupt.
There are even government-led efforts to discourage intra-state investments. In Lagos, where Tinubu is the political godfather, non-Lagosians are discriminated against and not allowed to vote during elections. “During the 2023 elections, Lagosians orginally from the South-East Nigeria were barred from voting – a situation that will likely recur in 2027. This is not what Yew could have allowed during his time in office,” said a political analsyt, Dr Onukogu Alumona.
Senior Economist, Mizuho Bank, Vishnu Varathan, explained Yew’s efforts to build one of the best educational systems in Asia. “His defining economic policy is arguably uncompromising standards for a universally accessible, top-flight public education system – astutely identifying human capital as Singapore’s key competitive advantage – supplemented with rigorous application of meritocracy.”
In Tinubu’s Nigeria, there are 15 mllion to 20 million out-of-school children. The few who are willing to go to school are often kidnapped and kept in forests for weeks. Several school kidnappings have recently occurred in Oyo, Kebbi, Borno and Niger states, with parents unwilling to let their children go to school again without proper security.
“One begins to ask, where is the Safe Schol Initiative? What happened to the project, and where is the money spent on it already?” asked a security analyst, Mr Adams Adebola.
Though insecurity was not Yew’s major problem at that time, his main challenges were high unemployment, poor housing, ethnic tensions and comunist influence. Yet, he resolved most of them,
To resolve unemployment crisis, he set up industrial estates, especially Jurong, to attract manufacturers. He woeed multinationals with tax incentives, while focusing on export-oriented industries instead of relying only on trade. On housing, he built hundreds of thousands of affordable homes.
On education, he reformed schools to create a skilled workforce, while emphasising English as a working language. He also fought corruption, while raising civil servants’ salaries to attract capable professionals, More importantly, he applied anti-corruption laws regardless of a person’s status or political infleunce – something Tinubu can’t achieve.
READ ALSO: None of 2027 aspirants has Tinubu’s competence, capacity – George, CEO, Barachel
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“Whoever compares Yew with Tinubu is not on this planeet. Under Yew, Singapore’s per capita GDP jumped from around $500 by a staggering 2800 percent to $14,500 by 1991.”
A former US President, Richard Nixon, once described Yew as “a big man on a small stage who in other times and other places, might have attained the world stature of a Churchill, Disraeli or a Gladstone.”
That is not the title that the Nigerian majority or even a foreign president can ascribe to Tinubu.
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About the Author
Odinaka Anudu
Editor and Managing Editor
Lagos, Nigeria
Odinaka Anudu is a seasoned journalist with nearly two decades of journalism experience. He has won 19 journalism awards and written thousands of stories for both local and international platforms. He has worked in eight different media organisations and travelled widely in various capacities. He is an investigative journalist, a newsroom leader, mentor and lecturer.
1 Comment
This is an interesting piece that went beyond simply reporting Governor Hope Uzodinma’s comparison of President Bola Tinubu to Singapore’s LKY like others did. But the manner the piece dismissed the Governor’s position was unexpected and too emotional. Anyone that has studied how LKY ran Singapore back then would agree that he introduced tough reform measures which made things difficult for the citizenry in the beginning before the reforms began to bear fruits. Back then, the opposition and even the media were up in arms against him yet he persevered, even to the extent of coming hard on dissecting voices (not happening here, even though it is debatable), and several years later, the results were obvious. Tinubu’s tenure is limited, unlike that of LKY, but we were all witnesses to the cost of living crisis that trailed his “shock therapy” of fuel subsidy removal but many would agree that things have been gradually improving although the macroeconomic effects are yet to be visible. In terms of foreign investment, it is not exactly through that not much is happening. The oil and gas sector is for instance, witnessing a rebound as Nigeria has in the last two years recorded more investments than its competitors in the continent as a result of new fiscal incentives introduced by Tinubu. His tax incentive to Shell is set to birth the $20bn Bonga Southwest Deepwater project. This is the first time since 2010 that Nigeria is having concrete deepwater investment interest. Of course, as an experience journalist, you are aware of the upward movement in country’s gross and net foreign reserves number. The last time the reserves were higher than $50bn was in the Yar’Adua years before his successor depleted it. We are having ongoing reforms in health and education sectors and it is interesting that this piece attempted to pile the blame for Nigeria’s 20 million out of school population on the federal government when it is obvious that basic education is the responsibility of subnational governments. My point is that LKY didn’t magically turn around the fortunes of Singapore. It took time. The country had its hard times as a result of his reforms and even if he spent 8 years in office and had a successor that didn’t depart from the reform path, Singapore would still have been better of. This is why Uzodinma did no wrong with his comparison of Tinubu with LKY.