Adebayo Tasks Tinubu On Fiscal Discipline

Presidential candidate of Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 2023, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has decried what he considered a lack of financial discipline in the President Bola Tinubu-led administration.
Adebayo charged the president to ensure more accountability in the spending of public funds.

The former presidential candidate, said “There is no accountability even for the money that is being spent. They are doing three simultaneous budgets running at the same time. Nobody does that and succeeds, even a magician will not succeed in that scenario where you have three budgets running simultaneously and you are not funding them.”

Adebayo, in a statement by his media team, accused the government of not abiding by its own fiscal laws.
He said the government must adhere to the appropriation law if the country is to have a meaningful economy.

“The first thing they need to do which they are not doing is that they need to obey the fiscal laws; that is to obey the Appropriation Act. Then, set a good target in the Appropriation Act,” he said.

He however charged the government to support the real economy by dealing with inflation, stressing that there was no way anybody could think of a meaningful economy without dealing with inflation.

“You have to manage inflation to a single digit. To do that, you have to manage spending which means you have to align your fiscal policy with your monetary policy so that you don’t have the wrong expansion that will put pressure on cost and push inflation.

“There is no way you can think of a meaningful economy if you don’t deal with inflation,” he said.

He stressed that the government must reduce poverty through job creation, as a way of supporting the real economy.

“You need to generate employment if you are going to have sustainable population for medium, short and long term taxation, which means that you need to look at your activity based on costing of your spending to say that there is an ability for your spending to rebound in job creation and to do that, you need to do two things. First, you have to make the cost of doing business come down because the cost of business is rising, it is not coming down. Then you have to bring down the cost of living because from both ends, employers cannot solve all the problems of the employee.

“So if the general inflation of the economy is down and purchasing power is up with reasonable pay, the worker can be more efficient. And to do all of that for those businesses and the cost of living, you have to invest in infrastructure, which means your capital expenditure has to be better than what they are doing now,” he stated.

Adebayo, who declared that he would contest the 2027 presidential election on the platform of the SDP stated that he would be focusing on poverty and insecurity because according to him N35 million have a food crisis while 135 million still live below the poverty line.

“And if you don’t deal with the inflation, cost of living, unemployment and infrastructure, you cannot get these numbers. I believe the country has all it takes to be a strong economy and one of the top economies in the world. We should be the one hosting the G20 economy summit, not just ghosting it.