Emmanuel Onwubiko
HASSAN Tunde Onwuegbu was just a little less than ten years when we all enrolled into a public secondary school in Kafanchan, deep in the south of Kaduna state just as his middle aged father was a junior staff of the then near -moribund Nigerian Railways.
Yours faithfully and Hassan had much more than just been school mates as our areas of similarities because Hassan’s family happened to be the longest staying tenant in my father’s modest housing asset in that diminutive and rusty Kafanchan town which then served as the regional headquarters of the Nigerian Railways.
Although Hassan and myself were best of friends, his dad’s penchant for not meeting up with the rent obligations to my dad became a source of intermittent dramas in the house.
Hassan’s dad found a perfect strategy of dodging any physical meeting with my dad so as to beat back any opportunity to remind him to do the needful in the area of paying his long overdue rents to my father. Aside my father, Hassan’s Dad became a chronic debtor to one other neighbor who sells food items because Hassan’s dad will always buy on credit promising to pay at the end of the month but predictably, he would be in no position to pay since the Nigerian government had become adept at owing public workers for as long as a year without payment of salaries.
His status as someone who practically owes everyone in the street nearly pushed Hassan’s dad into committing suicide but for the swift intervention of the kind hearted creditors such as my dad who decided to exercise immense patience with him just as Hassan was almost treated like my twin brother in such a way that we practically got fed together always by my mother- Mrs Gladys Ada Udensi.
Years after, Hassan is now a big man engineering expert in one of the federal universities but he constantly calls me to extend his appreciation for the generosity of my parents towards his family.
Such is the ordeal of a chronic debtor even at the level of an individual. How much worst will this be if a country is classified as such? To be rated in the world as one of the most heavily indebted nations in addition to being a member of the less fancied third world categorization, is not the kind of status symbol that a sane person would like to see his own country being identified with. This feeling was what gave a lot of public support to the then Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s led government when through the expertise of the then Finance minister – Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s debt profile of over $25 billion USD to Paris Club and London Club of creditors was cleared on generous discounts and terms.
Sadly, just like sweet bad habit of yore, some few years down the line, the current federal government of Muhammadu Buhari has led Nigeria right back into the infamous club of heavily indebted nations and the bulk of the loans collected have always ended up in the pockets of politicians and corrupt bureaucrats in the federal government even as the state of federal or public infrastructure has continued to nose-dive and several parts of Nigeria currently looks like villages of the sixteenth century primitive era.
The cost of governance has also continued to balloon out of control just as the regimes of taxation by the current government on Nigerians coupled with lack of employment opportunities for youngsters have posed much more than grave existential threat.
Poverty, high crime rate, high taxation and public institutional corruption are some of the afflictions stifling the advancement of the living standards of millions of Nigerians to a dangerous extent that even the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Hajia Umar Farouk, a few hours back admitted that Nigeria now has 90 million absolutely poor citizens. However, even amidst these poverty indices, senators have appropriated N5 billion of the national wealth to buy expensive SUVS for themselves even as the central government is borrowing from all sorts of places.
The debt office reports on Nigeria’s debt every three months. Its website shows that at the end of March 2015 – two months before Buhari took office on 29 May – the country owed a total of N12 trillion, says a research based organization. At the end of June 2015, this debt had risen slightly to N12.1 trillion. This was US$63.8 billion at the official exchange rate of the time, N196.95 to the dollar.
By the end of June 2018, total public debt had almost doubled to N22.4 trillion. The debt office said the latest increase comprised of a US$2.5 billion Eurobond issued by the government in February 2018. (Note: A Eurobond is a loan given out in a currency that is different to the currency of the country where it is issued.)
This took Nigeria’s total debt to US$73.2 billion, using the Central Bank of Nigeria’s 2018 exchange rate of N305 to the dollar. What is the government borrowing for? The debt management office justified the borrowings in its 2017 report on Nigeria’s national debt.
“While Nigeria’s total public debt stock is relatively low vis-à-vis the country’s GDP, the increased funding requirements needed to sustain the economic recovery, address the huge infrastructural deficit, as well as meet budget financing requirements, would entail enormous funding resources, including borrowing,” it said.mProf Olufemi Saibu interviewed by the researchers is of the economics department at the University of Lagos focuses on development macroeconomics and public finance. He told Africa Check the debt might be worrying, but would be justified if it were used for development projects and not just for regular spending on, for example, salaries and overheads.
“The debt profile is high but it’s not in the red lines yet,” Saibu said. “The problem is that the debt cannot continue to increase; there must be a check on it. And the question is, what are they using the debt for? The quality of projects, productivity and impact of the projects are what matters.”
Onwubiko, Heads Human Rights writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA)