Nigerian presidential candidate Bola Tinubu said he’ll phase out costly fuel subsidies and more than triple oil production to help accelerate growth in Africa’s biggest economy if he wins elections in February.
Tinubu will work with the nation’s central bank to “carefully review and better optimize” the nation’s exchange-rate system, he said Friday at the unveiling of his election-campaign manifesto in the capital, Abuja. He proposed basing the nation’s budget on the projected level of government spending, instead of the dollar value of projected oil revenue.
“As part of this prudent growth-based budgeting, we will establish a clear and mandatory inflationary ceiling on spending,” he said.
Tinubu, 70, is the ruling All Progressives Congress’s candidate in the election and one of the frontrunners to succeed President Muhammadu Buhari. His main rivals are Atiku Abubakar of the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party and Peter Obi from the Labour Party.
A Tinubu administration will limit Nigeria’s “exposure to large debt obligations denominated in foreign currency,” according to the document. His government will only contract non-naira loans that are “linked to projects that generate cash flows from which the debt can be repaid,” it said.
