Olawale Ajimotokan in Abuja
The All Progressives Congress (APC) said its candidate in the forthcoming presidential election, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu will not borrow in dollars from China and other lenders to build infrastructure that will stimulate growth and improve the standard of living of the average Nigerian.
The APC PCC National Youth Spokesman, Aliyu Audu, stated this on AIT ‘Focus Nigeria’ where he engaged the spokesmen of three other leading political parties in a panel discussion on ensuring transparency in management of foreign loans.
The discussion was convened by Chancellor Incorporated Trustees Citizens Rights Aid and Control Initiative, Godwin Ogboji.
Audu saw no problem with borrowing, noting all the countries including the US that are flourishing have higher debt to GDP ratio than Nigeria.
“The health of an economy is determined by certain parameters; it is not by the size of your loan. We will not source for money in dollars. There are other ways of ensuring we have this infrastructure deployed without necessarily going through the stress of foreign loan,” he said.
But the spokesman of PDP Campaign Council Dr Ehiedu Aniagwu, disagreed. He noted the N17.1 trillion foreign loan borrowed by the administration was outrageous while in the last quarter of last year, the country was spending as much as N310 billion in excess of what it earned to service the loan.
He decried the details of government borrowing as opaque in addition to the area the funds were deployed and other conditionalities attached to some borrowed funds.
Also, the Chief spokesman of Labour Party PCC, Yunusa Tanko, decried lack of transparency in the country’s foreign loan process over the years.
He said Labour party candidate, Peter Obi intends to block all of these leakages and generate revenue within the society and settle these debts that the two political parties have put the country into.
“We will subsidize production and subsidize consumption. What Peter Obi and his running mate intend to do is to change the narrative from a consuming nation to a producing nation,” he said.
