Yesterday, the Federal Government was criticized by the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP) for relying excessively on external and domestic borrowing to manage the economy.
While the PDP criticized the Federal Government’s excessive borrowing as outrageous and opaque, the LP thought that the country’s foreign loan application process lacked transparency.
Speaking on television, Charles Aniagwu, spokesman for the PDP presidential campaign, claimed that President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has increased Nigeria’s foreign debt by three times more than all previous governments combined.
He criticized the current administration’s excessive N17.1 trillion in foreign debt borrowing and bemoaned the fact that the nation was paying up to N310 billion more on debt servicing during the last quarter of 2022 than it was bringing in.
Aniagwu voiced unhappiness with the area the funds were used for and other conditions associated with the borrowed cash, noting that the facts of government borrowing were opaque.
He stated: “Atiku is not just looking at where we are owing. I recall that I was part of those who travelled to China to secure a $1 billion loan for the purpose of building the Abuja/Kaduna railway and four different airports. We need to be very clear as to what we were taking and the terms of payment.”
“The number of years you have as a moratorium. And we calculated then that the revenue you are going to get both from the rail track as well as the different airports will even be more than enough to pay back what we have borrowed.”
Also speaking, Dr. Yunusa Tanko, spokesperson for the LP Presidential Campaign Council (PCC), criticized other political parties for their lack of transparency over the years in the country’s foreign loan procedure.
He expressed hope that, should he win the election, his principal, Mr. Peter Obi, the party’s presidential candidate, will be able to change the course of the country.
He stated: “Two political parties over the years have supervised the issue of lack of transparency in management of our debts over the years. When you add both of them together, you will have 24 years system supervision on lack of transparency functionally generated over the years.”
They are also keeping an eye on the oil theft problem, which has put this nation in peril.
“So what do we intend to do differently when we win the election? Peter Obi intends to block all leakages and generate revenue within the society and settle these debts that the two political parties have put the country into.
“We will subsidise production and subsidise consumption. What Peter Obi and his vice intend to do is to change the narrative from a consuming nation to a production nation.”
The National Youth Spokesperson for the Tinubu-Shettima Campaign Council, Aliyu Audu, stated that Senator Bola Tinubu, the organization’s candidate for the upcoming presidential election, will not take out a dollar loan to build infrastructure that will spur economic growth and raise the standard of living for the average Nigerian.
“The health of an economy is determined by certain parameters, it is not by the size of your loan.”
We will not source for money in dollars. There are other ways of ensuring we have these infrastructure deployed without necessarily going through the stress of foreign loans,” he concluded.
