Nigeria’s Senate President, Dr. Ahmad Lawan, on Wednesday, urged the Federal Government to reduce its local and foreign borrowing and seek alternative ways of implementing infrastructural projects.
Speaking during the passage of the 2021-2023 Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper, including a retained revenue of N7.89tr; Fiscal deficit of N5.19tr; and N4.28tr in new borrowings to fund the expected deficit in the N13.08tr 2021 Appropriation Bill, he called for a lot of effort to ensure revenue generating agencies do their work promptly, efficiently and effectively.
“Where they have challenges, we must help them. Like most of us said, borrowing needs to be carefully applied here. There are projects that I feel we should ensure we don’t borrow to fund.
“We should explore other opportunities in sourcing funds such as the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT), Public Private Partnerships and so many other options. I think we should explore on those so that we minimize the borrowing.
“There are lot of businesses that have interest in the development of our infrastructures, so we should explore the other means.
“But then again, we cannot eliminate borrowing, that is the sad part of it. I think in the past we deluded ourselves into thinking that Nigeria is the richest country in the world, meanwhile we are not developing our infrastructure.
“If we had applied whatever we had then, especially in our good years, we would have found that we wouldn’t have any money to spare to call ourselves rich.
“We need to look at the possibility of reducing the kind of borrowing we do in order to ensure that we don’t accumulate so much deficit and end up spending so much of our revenue servicing debts,” Lawan said.
The Senate President bemoaned the high recurrent expenditure profile of government, underscoring the need for merger of agencies to reduce cost of governance, which would require the political will.
Unfortunately, he added, “we know what to do, but when it comes to doing the right thing, we find it difficult to do it.
“I think the time has come for government to do so, and government includes us, to address this issue.
“There are so many agencies, and these are agencies that were created to address specific challenges at the time.
“Now, they are irrelevant. They are simply conduits that are given money every year, while they have no value to add to governance.
“We need to really work closely with the Executive arm of Government. I know it is going to be a tough call, because it will be said this is not a time for people to lose their jobs, but somehow we need to find a way out of this as the cost of governance is high,” Lawan said.
