An All Progressives Congress (APC) foundation member and immediate past Director-General of the Voice of Nigeria (VON), Mr. Osita Okechukwu, has appealed to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (PBAT), to Nigerians from what he described as a ‘looming debt trap’, “so as to fulfill his Renewed Hope Agenda and allow the citizenry to breathe.”
Okechukwu, an unrepentant former President Buhari’s loyalist, pointed out that after “perusing” the 2025 budget proposal, which Tinubu presented to the National Assembly last Wednesday, December 18, he could not understand how the Renewed Hope Agenda would bring the intended succour to Nigerians “when we are owing all manner of debts both, local and foreign, with prohibitive interest rate of treasury bills, plus dangerous dollar denominated loans, and short term EuroBond (and), therefore the imperative of Fiscal Restructuring of Debt Service.”
Okechukwu explained that his appeal to the President stemmed from the famous “Benjamin Franklin admonition to that he who goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing; hence the imperative of setting up a high powered panel of inquiry to reexamine our debts so as to unravel genuine and less than transparent debt obligations.”
Warning that the huge debt burden “is a threat to our nascent democracy and will drain resources meant for health, education and poverty alleviation,” Okechukwu regretted that the budget for defence at N4.91tr; infrastructure at N4.06tr); education at N3.52tr and health at N2.48tr, altogether totaling N14.97tr, are far less than the N15.8trn budgeted for debt service.
While giving kudos to the Administration for the removal of fuel subsidy, Okechukwu, however, lamented that “the humongous debt service has become the new elephant anti-production room.”
“Yes, fuel subsidy is gone, albeit fuel subsidy regime which (was rooted in) the planlessness and squandermania that governed the sordid debt exercise. Or do we forget when Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, now WTO Director-General instituted a panel, which probed and found out that the fuel subsidy regime was riddled with corruption, upon which the culprits resorted to kidnap of her mother?” Okechukwu remonstrated.
“Accordingly, Mr. President should dust up Iweala’s file and other bad loan files with the intendment to recover monies and return Nigeria to productive economy.”
Okechukwu recalled that the first loan Nigeria borrowed from the Paris Club was $13.1 million in 1964 for the construction of Niger Dam, and Nigeria’s debt relief deal with same Paris Club of creditors under President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration in 2005, noting that the nation’s cancelled debt in December 2004 was $35.994 billion while “our debt burden today stands at N121.67trn or $91.46bn.”
On the way forward, Okechukwu called for what he described as “a high-powered multilateral panel of inquiry”, comprising eminent local and international statesmen “to reexamine our domestic and foreign debts as the only way to save Nigerians from the looming debt trap.”
“Secondly, plug the plug corruption loophole and restrict borrowing to only critical infrastructure via humanitarian groups like SUKUK and friends of Nigeria,” he surmised.
