"Bola Tinubu has been making positive noises during his campaign with regard to these issues." Prior to the election, many investors had said that any successor to the incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari, who comes from the same party as Tinubu and has favoured statist economic policy, would likely be an improvement. "The proof's in the pudding," said John Mumo, a partner at Blakeney, an Africa-focused equities fund management firm. "He is a political godfather and kingmaker, he does know the political machinery and hopefully that will allow him to push through quite difficult reforms." Some analysts said that Tinubu's reliance on political patronage may make some reforms less likely, citing the benefit that many politicians are said to get from the petrol subsidy, which the president-elect has pledged to phase out. "Tinubu will hike taxes, that's something he knows how to do. So he will try to offset (the fuel subsidy)," said Tunde Ajileye, a partner at Nigerian firm SBM Intelligence. Tinubu has pledged to boost oil production, currently languishing around 1.39 million barrels per day (bpd) and well below its 1.8 million bpd OPEC quota, to 2.6 million bpd by 2027. "I think he's going to be able to deal with oil theft and raise oil production... for the primary purposes of being able to control it," Ajileye said. Getting the fiscal situation and interest payment burden under control needs to be a top priority for Nigeria's next president, said Sergey Dergachev, a fund manager at Union Investment. The International Monetary Fund estimated that Nigeria's government spent 96% of its revenue on debt servicing last year.
"It is a huge challenge," said Dergachev.
(Reporting by Rachel Savage, additional reporting by Karin
Strohecker in London, editing by Christina Fincher)
