FG To Restart Direct Cash Transfers To 12m Nigerians

Recognizing the significant impact of food prices on household budgets, the government is taking steps to increase food availability and drive down costs.

The minister reiterated President Bola Tinubu’s intervention to release 60,000 metric tonnes of food grains.

He said: “The goal is to put food, to put feed into the mill, into the market, in an attempt to drive down the cost of food and make food available. Right now, that is the key priority in terms of the fiscal side, in terms of the government side.

Defending the plan of the direct cash transfer to the poorest and most vulnerable in society, Wale Edun argued that “history has shown, evidence has shown that when you pay someone directly, you put money in their hand. It reduces poverty because they decide where the shoe is pinching most.

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“So it is a direct benefit, it has a direct effect on poverty. It alleviates, and there’s a commitment to immediately start that process. So that is, as far as these interventions are concerned and the landscape which we as a team are facing, we have a commitment to help to bring down inflation”.

“Growing the economy, creating jobs and lifting millions and millions of Nigerians out of poverty, that’s the ultimate goal of President Bola Tinubu and his economic policies.”

The minister acknowledged that the historical reliance on “Ways and Means” financing was a source of inflation. The government he said is committed to reducing this debt burden through various financial and revenue-generating initiatives.

He stated: “On the monetary side, Ways and Means have been identified, and we too agree that the historical legacy of Ways and Means that was inherited has to be dealt with, and has to be paid out one way or the other. And those are the financial engineering, those are the revenue initiatives that we are focused on to remove that burden, that inflationary burden on the economy.”

Edun said that close collaboration between the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank is crucial in tackling inflation and stabilizing the Naira. To this end, the Central Bank is using various tools to achieve these goals, including stabilizing interest rates and managing foreign exchange rates.