How Tinubu’s Government Plans On Bringing Down Food Prices, Other Commodities – Wale Edun

The Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, has said that the fiscal and monetary authorities are complementing each other to bring down inflation.

Edun stated this yesterday while fielding questions from journalists after a meeting with investors at the ongoing Spring Meetings of the (IMF) and World Bank in Washington DC.

The Minister said that the Federal Government would pin down Ways and Means to deal with the problem of too much liquidity in the system.

According to him, “We will pin down Ways and Means to alleviate the pressure of the excess money in the system.

“By so doing the two authorities are working hand in hand to bring down inflation and pressure on price stability and stabilising the exchange rate, with the target of bringing down interest rate so that investors can borrow at a more affordable rate and getting the economy going in the right direction again.

“We need to borrow less and focus more on domestic resource mobilisation. We want long-term resources to avoid repayment and refinancing pressures.”

The Minister added that the nation’s tax/GDP was too low, even lower than the African region average and that as such, reforms were underway to streamline the number of taxes, deploy technology and implement policies that would double tax revenue in the next three years

His words, “At 10 per cent to GDP, what should I say, it would appear as if some people are not paying their taxes.

“Our strategy is to increase the tax revenue without increasing the rate of taxes. We want to deploy technology to make tax collection more efficient.

“Our analysis has shown that 90 per cent of tax revenue comes from nine tax heads while we have over 80 taxes from federal, through states to local councils.”