The Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, says the Nigerian economy is moving in the right direction as policies of the new administration has started slowing down food inflation.
The minister spoke virtually on Channels Television’s Business Incorporated programme from Washington DC where he is attending the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings.
Edun said himself and Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Olayemi Cardoso, are in Washington DC to showcase the progress made so far in the Nigerian economy.
The finance minister said, “The Economic Team of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is here to showcase the progress so far of his bold, courageous and strategic reforms of the Nigerian economy in order to get it stabilise and get investment in to get it growing again.
“We’ve all seen what has happened in terms of stabilising the exchange rate and inflation which is headed in the right direction.
“If you look closely at the numbers that came out yesterday (Monday), you will see that there is a slowing of the rate of increase of food inflation, things are moving in the right direction, government revenues are up, even oil revenues are up but not as much as we will like.”
Prices of food and basic commodities have gone through the roof in the last weeks, as Nigerians battle one of the country’s toughest economic crises sparked by the current government’s twin policies of petrol subsidy removal and unification of forex windows.
However, on Monday, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS)’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) report showed that the food inflation rate in March 2024 stood at 3.62%, showing a decline of 0.17% from February 2024, when it was 3.79%. But the report showed that for year-on-year, food inflation reached 40.01% in March 2024, marking an increase of 15.56 percentage points from 24.45% in March 2023.
