Atiku Abubakar, the defeated opposition presidential candidate, has penned an article questioning President Muhammadu Buhari over the piling national debts, especially the recent bid to borrow an additional $29.6billion to finance infrastructure.
In the article which coincides with Buhari’s 77th birthday, Atiku describes as irresponsible Nigeria’s decision to borrow more money, when the financial indicators are flashing warning signs. Nigeria, he said is spending more money on debt servicing than on capital projects.
“The fact that Nigeria currently budgets more money for debt servicing (₦2.7 trillion), than we do on capital expenditure (₦2.4 trillion) is already an indicator that we have borrowed more money than we can afford to borrow. And the thing is that debt servicing is not debt repayment. Debt servicing just means that we are paying the barest minimum allowable by our creditors.
“And while spending 50% of our current revenue on debt servicing, this administration wants to take further loans of $29.6 billion! To say that this is irresponsible is itself an understatement”, he wrote.
Atiku stated that Nigeria does not need to borrow as he offered his campaign programme as panacea: he urges the Buhari administration to re-engineer the NNPC and adopt the NLNG model in its governance. The NNLG, a joint venture, declares billions of dollars as profit every year, the NNPC, he said, declares losses.
“The money the Muhammadu Buhari administration wants to borrow to fund its Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) could be acquired without sinking the nation into further debt. All it requires is visionary leadership and business acumen.
“In my economic blueprint, I said that rather than turn in regular losses (which it has consistently been doing), the best thing to do with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation is to reform it. Of course, the administration’s paid propagandists went into overdrive, accusing me of planning to sell the NNPC to my friends. But just last week, Saudi Arabia’s ARAMCO, the most profitable company in the world, took that route and almost broke the global stock market with the most successful initial IPOs in world history, bar none. Ironically, Saudi Aramco raised $29.4 billion via this IPO. Just the amount this administration wants to borrow,” he wrote.
The opposition politician did not just limit his intervention to a mere rebuke of the Buhari administration as he also appealed to Nigerian youths to write their senators to reject the loan.
He called the power cabal behind the Buhari administration a ‘ravenous cabal’.
“I call on Nigeria’s youth to identify the Senator representing their senatorial zones and write to them, urging them to vote against this request. Do this, because it is you and your children that will pay back these loans that would be squandered by this ravenous cabal who do not have the word enough in their vocabulary”.
