To say Africa’s most populous country and second largest economy, Nigeria, is heading back to perpetual economic slavery will be an understatement. It stands reason on the head how a country as richly endowed as Nigeria would be romancing foreign loans at this crucial period just few years after it came out of the choking grip of debt burden! The most disgusting aspect of this is the brazen recklessness with which the Goodluck Jonathan-led government is going about getting the loans.
Shortly after he became the acting president following the incapacitation of former President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, Jonathan wrote the National Assembly to approve the borrowing of $915m from the World Bank. He specifically said in the letter that $179 million (N27.02bn) out of the total loan package would be utilized for the funding of the 2010 budget.
“The World Bank Portfolio of facilities totalling $915 million out of which $179 million would be drawn in fiscal 2010, is of particular essence as it would be deployed to Urban Water and Transport, Human Capacity Development and Power infrastructure projects across the country.”
His finance minister Olusegun Aganga, formerly of the Goldman Sachs, claimed otherwise stating that the loan was not meant to finance the budget but to fast-track economic development in the country and to assist some 13 states in the country to meet some developmental challenges! Despite the public criticism of the borrowing, the National Assembly gave approval for the loan, which Aganga described as “a facility obtained under concessionary terms with insignificant interest.”
While the dust is yet to settle and less than five months after the $915m “facility” craze, the president has gone back to the National Assembly requesting the legislature to approve external borrowing of $5.242 billion in addition to the present $4.2 billion foreign debt owed by the country. Nigerians should carefully monitor President Jonathan Goodluck. Few years after repaying huge foreign debts, Nigeria’s external loan is to reach $9.4 billion based on a proposed 2010 borrowing plan of the federal government.
What is worrisome is the fact that the current administration that has less than a year to spend in office is gradually taking the country back to the pre-1999 era where its debt stood at about $36bn.
The question is should the country still tread this pathway again considering its past experience on foreign debt and how it only recently got out of its crushing burden?
Nigeria borrowed less than $10 billion dollars probably with ‘insignificant interest’ then, but later coughed out $35 billion over 20 years due to ‘insignificant interest’ charges and penalty for not paying on schedule and still owed $30 billion as at 2004 and later $36 billion before receiving the debt forgiveness of $18 billion which helped in our exit from the hell of debt in 2006 under the Obasanjo administration.
More heart-breaking in the foreign debt romance of President Goodluck Jonathan is the fear that the loan may not be used for the purpose for which they are being drawn. They may end up the way of the previous ones, which impact cannot be justified in the lives of Nigerians. More so, the fact that billion of naira is currently being spent by the government on frivolities compounds the situation.
While the government claims it needs the foreign loans to finance developmental projects in the power, transport and energy sectors, the same government is spending 17 billion naira on the country’s 50th independence anniversary. The same government just approved the purchase of three new jets for the Presidential Air Fleet. The planes include a Gulfstream G550 and two new Falcon 7X Aircraft and will cost the country $154.3 million or N23.2 billion. A government that could spend millions of naira in far away London on anniversary party will have to borrow money to fund elections in less than six months. 250 million naira is already approved for the production of compendiums on Nigeria at 50. The approved compendiums, according to the government’s mouthpiece Dora Akunyili, will come in form of 20,000 copies of 800page publications and 5,000 CD ROMs. Yet there is no money to ensure power is stable, roads become motorable, security of lives and property, healthcare is accessible by all.
Curiously, in the face of the ongoing squandering of public wealth and march
towards debt slavery, the civil society groups, such as the Save Nigeria Group,
Enough is Enough and the likes who were at the forefront of the call to install
Goodluck Jonathan as acting president while former president Yar’Adua was sick,
are maintaining a deafening silence.
Is this the manifestation of ‘saving
Nigerians from cabals’ that the so called Save Nigeria Group sold to us few
months back? Enough is Enough group is not telling president Jonathan that
‘enough is enough’ of foreign loans, frivolous spending, foreign trips!
Let Nigerians speak out now before they milk the country dry and dump it once again at the abyss of debt burden. No nation prospers on debt. Goodluck to Nigeria!
