The Social Democratic Party’s (SDP) presidential flagbearer, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has called on the government to refocus monetary policy on bolstering the real economy. Since no economy can achieve true growth or stability without first controlling growing prices, he insisted that combating inflation must be a national priority.
“Inflation must be controlled to a single digit. In order to achieve that, you must control spending, which entails coordinating your monetary and fiscal policies to avoid having the incorrect expansion that would drive up costs and inflation. Without addressing inflation, it is impossible to imagine a functional economy, he stated.
He emphasized that in order to promote the real economy, the government must eliminate poverty by creating jobs. “If you want to have a sustainable population for medium-term, short-term, and long-term taxation, you must create jobs. To do this, you must look at your activity based on the cost of your spending to determine whether your spending can rebound in job creation. To do that, you must do two things.”
The cost of conducting business must first be reduced because it is increasing rather than decreasing. The cost of living must then be reduced because companies are unable to address every issue that employees face.
Therefore, workers can be more productive if the economy’s overall inflation rate is lower and their purchasing power increases with fair compensation. And you have to spend in infrastructure in order to do all of that for those enterprises and the expense of living, so your capital expenditure needs to be more than what they are now doing,” he said.
“There is no accountability even for the money that is being spent,” he said, criticizing the government’s lack of financial control. They are working on three budgets concurrently. In the situation when you have three budgets operating concurrently and you are not funding them, no one does it and succeeds—not even a magician.
He urged the government to constantly follow the appropriation legislation if the nation wishes to have a meaningful economy, denouncing the government for failing to follow its own budgetary regulations. “The first thing they should do, but aren’t, is to follow the fiscal laws, including the Appropriations Act. Next, establish a good goal in the Appropriations Act, he advised.
Adebayo, who announced that he would run for president in 2027 on the SDP platform, said he would concentrate on poverty and insecurity since, in his words, 135 million people still live below the poverty line and N35 million are experiencing a food crisis. Additionally, you cannot obtain these figures if you ignore unemployment, inflation, the cost of living, and infrastructure. I think the nation has everything it needs to have a robust economy and rank among the best in the world. Instead of just skipping the G20 economy summit, we ought to be the ones hosting it.
