The Social Democratic Party’s (SDP) presidential flagbearer, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has called on the government to shift monetary policy back toward bolstering the real economy. Since no economy can achieve true growth or stability without first controlling growing prices, he insisted that addressing inflation must be a national priority.
“You must control inflation 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 improper expansion that would drive up costs and inflation. Without addressing inflation, it is impossible to envision a meaningful economy, he stated.
In order to assist the actual economy, he emphasized that the government must create jobs in order to eliminate poverty. “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 need to do two things.”
The first step is to reduce operating expenses since they are increasing rather than decreasing. The cost of living must then be reduced since 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 is increased with fair compensation. And you have to invest in infrastructure in order to do all of that for those enterprises and the cost of living, which means your capital spending needs to be better than what they are now doing,” he said.
“There is no accountability even for the money that is being spent,” he said, denouncing the government’s lack of financial control. Three budgets are being worked on concurrently. When you have three budgets operating at the same time and you are not funding them, nobody does it and succeeds—not even a magician.
He urged the government to always go by the appropriations law if the nation wishes to have a real economy, denouncing it for failing to follow its own budgetary regulations. “The first thing they should do, which they are not, is to follow the fiscal laws, including the Appropriations Act. “Then, in the Appropriations Act, set a good target,” he stated.
Adebayo, who announced that he would run for president in 2027 on the SDP platform, said that he would concentrate on poverty and insecurity since, in his words, 135 million people still live below the poverty line and N35 million people have a food crisis. Additionally, you cannot achieve these figures if you do not address unemployment, inflation, the cost of living, and infrastructure. The nation has everything it needs, in my opinion, 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 hosting it.
