Atiku Hits Buhari: You Need Intellectual Capacity, Not $30 Billion Loan To Fix Nigeria

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has criticized President Muhammadu Buhari’s plans to borrow $29.9 billion from external sources.

This came after Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, revealed on Monday that the upper legislative chamber would approve the federal government’s 2016-2018 external borrowing plan sent to it by President Buhari.

In his earlier request rejected by the 8th Senate, Buhari had said the loan was necessary to enable his administration execute key infrastructural projects across the country between 2016 and 2018.

But reacting in a statement he personally singed on Tuesday, Atiku said what the Buhari administration needed was “intellectual capacity” and not more loans that would sing the nation into further debt.

The statement reads:

“John Quincy Adams once said “there are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.” He may have very well been referring to Nigeria of the last three years.

“Barely two weeks ago, I warned during my Founder’s Day lecture at the American University of Nigeria, Yola, that Nigeria had taken almost as much foreign debt in the last three years, as she had taken in the thirty years before 2015 combined.

“Now that is frightening. And very true. Frightening, not just because of the amount, but because after such unprecedented borrowing, we have emerged as the world headquarters for extreme poverty and the global capital for out of school children.

“It begs the question: what were the funds used for? I have said it time and again. The business of government is too serious to be left in the hands of politicians.

“We must all ask questions because if they throw away the future, it is not going to be their future they are throwing away, it will be all our futures.

“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.