*Urges FG to solve inflation, high unemployment
A former Kwara State governorship aspirant, Engineer Pastor Sunday Adebayo Babalola, has urged President Ahmed Bola Tinubu to address insecurity so that farmers can go back to the farm without fear of attack and kidnapping.
He noted that agriculture should be the bedrock of Nigeria’s economy but noted that with the current insecurity, farmers have deserted the farms for their safety.
He spoke in an interview with journalists.
He said, “Agriculture has been described as a sector that can provide massive employment for the people, transform and highly industrialise Nigeria. This administration should optimise the sector for job creation and economic and industrial advancement.
“I agree entirely but there is a problem. With kidnapping on the farms, and with herders killing people on the farm, who will go to the farm and do what? Ignoring the problem, people will say agriculture will solve many of Nigeria’s challenges, but what of the problem that is within the society that even when you release money for agriculture and people want to do it, they can not do it because of the security problems that are there? Who wants to go to the bush and somebody will kill or kidnap him? Now, some people go to the farm in groups.
“Even though they go in groups, if those gunmen come with sophisticated weapons, what can the farmers in groups do? Maybe one of them will escape and say this is what happened to the rest when we went in groups to farm. It is very sad! The fact is that you have to solve the fundamentals and insecurity is one of the fundamentals. That one requires an urgent solution. Why do we have security agencies? How many kinds of military and paramilitary agencies do we have in the nation and yet we have not been able to solve insecurity?
“Modern and sophisticated weapons should be added in the fight against insecurity than relying more on human efforts to combat insecurity?. It is not rocket science. How are they doing it? How can we improve on it? We can do so many things with science and technology. But again, the challenge is that if people are not going to make money out of it, they will not allow it to happen. If they are not the ones that will bring the technology, they will not allow it to happen.”
Babalola also said the high unemployment rate in Nigeria is a time bomb.
He called on the government and other stakeholders to address it.
He said, “As of the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2020, the Nationa Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Nigeria’s unemployment rate stood at 33.3 per cent. The Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) projected it will rise to 37 per cent in 2023, while Global audit and tax advisory firm, KPMG, projected that Nigeria’s unemployment rate is expected to rise to 40.6%in 2023.
“Sincerely it is a time bomb. How the bomb is going to explode is what we can not see for now because a hungry man is an angry man. So the government needs to find ways to tackle this unemployment. The government should create an environment for businesses to do business. That will provide substantially more jobs for unemployed people. Which business are you going to do in Nigeria with a bank loan of almost 30 per cent interest rate? Nobody will collect that. Except if you are trading, then you collect it to go and buy large goods and trade and within three months you pay back. Even with that one, the profit margin will be reasonably low.”
Babalola also lamented the nation’s high inflation rate and called on the govenrment to urgently find a solution to it.
He said, “I have a friend who is an economist, in fact, a guru in Economics and he told me that there are three indices that they look at when they want to control inflation. The indices are the exchange rate, interest rate and inflation rate. He said you can control two. So they try to control the interest rates and exchange rates. But sincerely at about N760/$1 on the black market, the interest rate of between 22 and 30 per cent, what are you controlling? You are not controlling anything. My prayer is that President Tinubu will not print more money because that will kill everything. Because the time this thing started, he suggested to President Buhari that he should print more money. The printing of money is what is bringing high inflation in the US today. They are printing more money and it is now hyperinflation. They said it is going to be transitory but it has come to stay.
“My advice is that they should try to control the other two. We have every means to control them if we look inwards.”