A capital market holding company, Afrinvest West Africa Limited, has advised monetary and fiscal authorities to rethink their anti-inflation strategies in a bid to address the ugly narrative of a surging inflation rate.
The Managing Director, of Afrinvest West Africa Limited, Ike Chioke, disclosed this in a statement on Wednesday in Lagos.
In the statement, Chioke called for the unveiling of the 2023 Nigerian Banking Sector Report titled ‘Getting Nigeria to Work Again’
He explained that both the monetary and fiscal authorities had been fixated on the control of the money supply and selective tax reliefs.
“In our view, an effective strategy for taming the high inflation rate would address structural bottlenecks (notably, insecurity and infrastructural gaps), improve ease of doing business, and incentivise large-scale local production of agriculture and manufactured goods alongside effective liquidity management and proper anchoring of market yields to the Monetary Policy Rate,” he said.
Chioke warned that failure to stem the surging inflation tide in the near term would result in a contagion financial sector crisis and by extension, derail other segments of the economy from the growth path,” Given banks’ pivotal role as an economic bridge between the supply and demand segments of the economy,” he said.
Also speaking, the Chief Executive Officer, of the Ministry of Finance Incorporated, Dr. Armstrong Takang, said the government took the right step by instituting forex reforms and freeing forex previously used to defend the naira.
He said the Federal Government had in the past lost so much forex trying to defend the naira.
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