A PROFESSOR of Economics at the Lagos Business School, Bongo Adi, has urged the President Bola Tinubu administration to rationalise the budget of the Federal Government with credible data and statistics.
Speaking on Arise TV on May 26, Adi stressed that rationalising the budget of government agencies and parastatals would mitigate the rate of financial leakages in the country.
He described the annual budgets presented by the Nigerian government as a crude one which should be well scrutinised.
READ ALSO:
Declare your assets, AFRICMIL tells Tinubu
US, others congratulate Tinubu, pledge support
Tinubu promises unified forex regime, agricultural hubs in states
Full text of President Bola Tinubu’s inaugural address
“Nigeria would have huge savings if its expenditure could be brought to a judicious estimate,” he said.
The economist advised the Tinubu administration to implement the recommendations of the Oronsaye Report which stated that some agencies of the government should be scrapped.
“We have too many MDAs and remember the Oronsaye Report. The incoming administration should implement the Oronsaye Report which rationalised the agencies of government. The report had shown that more than half of the agencies of government should not be there and we have so many duplications.”
He further advised the government to focus on how to generate double digits growth that would have measurable impact on the lives of Nigerians.
“The Buhari administration targeted inequality and the poor but you know that we can never solve the problem of poverty by addressing the poor people alone.
“When there is economic growth everybody will live comfortably because the economy is actually the cumulative growth of the individual firms and is an indicator that all the set segments of that economy are growing.
“What the incoming administration should focus on is how to generate global economic growth that will take care of unemployment; that will take care of social risk, health.”
The ICIR had reported that analysts said former President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration failed to lift many Nigerians out of poverty due to lack of attention on the human development index (HDI).
Speaking with The ICIR, a development expert and associate consultant for the British Department for International Development (DFID), Celestine Okeke, said that inflationary pressures have been rising because of the government’s knee-jerk approach to policies and less attention to human capital development.
Okeke said, “Most of our intervention programmes failed because they are knee-jerk. Look at our Anchor Borrowers Programme and see how it was politicised, and now, we have the CBN lamenting people are not paying back.”
Another development economist, Kelvin Emmanuel, told The ICIR that improving the HDI would stimulate economic activities.
Emmanuel said, “Buhari started, for instance, with closing the borders and widening the size of the budget while relying on the Central Bank to provide the deficit financing of the budget.”
He stressed that the more the ways and means is abused, the more the CBN faces a currency depreciation problem, and the more it keeps adjusting the rates to meet up with the parallel market and official rates against the dollar because of exchange rate issues.
Emmanuel argued that the reality on the ground is that inflation is double digit.
The ICIR reported that the consumer price index showed that the country’s inflation rate rose 59 times under Buhari’s eight-year administration.
The data gathered revealed that within the eight years, inflation consistently rose from January to December in 2016 and 2020. On average, the inflation rate rose more in 2017, 2021 and 2022.
The report noted that the constant increase in food prices contradicted the Federal government’s claim that it had achieved food sufficiency in the country.
