Nigeria entered this lap of democratic system of governance
with a huge loan burden on her head. One notable one was the Paris Club debt
which former President Olusegun Obasanjo alongside former Minister of Finance
Madam Okonjo Iweala helped Nigeria get pardon for. The tenable reason Mr.
Obasanjo gave was obvious, we could not have been servicing these loans and
expect to develop as a nation. Today, however, Nigeria is back in the loan mire
and she doesn’t seem like she has had enough of how much she has borrowed yet.
Our national yearly budgets in the last few years have been dependent
on loans. Our budget developers and leaders fill our budgets with projects that
are overpriced. By the time the budget is ready, it is already too high for the
expected revenue that should be accrued to the nation in the budgeted year. The
government thus finds good reasons to go borrowing, while the same borrowed
funds get syphoned through the many loopholes that have been created in the
budgets.
Check out the indices used to benchmark our budgets. They are
always on the safer end. For example, the benchmark for the exchange rate of
the dollar is always higher than the current exchange rate while the benchmark
for the sale of crude oil which is our major source of foreign exchange is always
at a lower price. Even when economic realities prove better than expected, we
never seem to get enough funds to fund our budget. Uncompleted projects at both
the federal and state levels are scattered all over the country but the monies budgeted
for such projects have been paid for.
Every year, there is much ado about budget funding and we
get to hear that there is a loan somewhere that our governments expect to cover
budget deficits with even when the budgeted projects aren’t carried out. More funds
are stolen from our budgets than are used to do the projects that they have
been budgeted for. Despite this, the government consistently goes around
begging for loans which end in people’s pockets.
The state governments are not left out in this loan
quagmire. Many of the states of this federation called Nigeria are heavily
indebted to nations and organizations across the world, senselessly plugging
into the loan brouhaha. You’d wonder why a state government should create a
budget worth trillions of naira when its internally generated revenue and
federal allocations don’t sum up. Where was the governor expecting to get funds
from to fund the budget?
Some governors in a bid to show that they have good plans
for their states create big budgets that are impossible to fund and they start
projects that they don’t finish. When asked why so many uncompleted projects,
they claim there was no funds. They should not have started what they could not
finish. They put themselves under
pressure to get funds from outside their shores just so that they could be seen
in good light by their citizens but end up putting the financial state of their
states in jeopardy. Almost every state in Nigeria is has to budget loan
servicing into their yearly budgets and that has to come first before the
projects they have to undertake for the year.
The issue of budget padding is rife. Imagine collecting
loans for a padded budget. It means a good chunk of the money gets into private
hands and subsequent governments will have to pay for money that was sidelined
for personal use. Everyone that seats as governor wants to also have his own
deal of the national cake so he also pads his own budget and gets his own loans
to fund it if the state revenue can’t afford it.
The problem with these loans is that citizens are kept in
the dark the details. Our leaders think they have become gods the moment they
take up political responsibility. They talk too much before they get on the
seat but once they do sit there, they turn mute. They shade the details of the
loans in secrecy but expect the loans to be paid by revenue gotten from the
people. Subsequent governments now have to divert monies meant for development
to paying loans. This is why some governments can’t pay salaries of workers and
make other statutory payments.
The recent romance with China and the subsequent loans
arriving from there is getting Nigerians worried and they do have reasons to be
seeing that the details of these Chinese loan deals are unknown. There are
fears n different quarters about the impending danger the future of this nation
will be in when we lack knowledge of what is done presently.
Only recently, China started a military base in Zambia and
took over a university in Tanzania. While we don’t know the terms of agreement that
these nations entered into with China, Nigerians are afraid that China may be
slowly infiltrating into its affairs using its loans as trap. We don’t know
what clauses were made in the agreements for these loans, but our lack of
knowledge won’t stop the Chinese from enforcing their side of the bargain if
Nigeria reneges in its agreement.
We are praying that Nigerian leaders don’t sell this nation
before we become aware. They can easily sign citizenship for their children elsewhere
in foreign countries but those of us who can’t get out will be forced to bear
the brunt of the mistakes made by those who call themselves our leaders. Our
prayer is, we will not be sold off in a new method of colonialism that is
eating deep into the spine of Africa. God will help us.
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