Following the recent disclosure of the country’s 77 trillion Naira debt, Omoyele Sowore, the presidential candidate of the African Action Congress, AAC, accused President Muhammadu Buhari of “borrowing Nigeria back to Stone Age” on Thursday.
Recall that the Director-General, DG, of the Debt Management Office, Patience Oniha, recently disclosed during a public presentation of the 2023 budget that if the National Assembly approves President Muhammadu Buhari’s request to restructure the Ways and Means Advances, Nigeria’s public debt burden could reach N77 trillion.
However, Sowore warned that if elected president in 2023, repayment of the previous administration’s 77 trillion naira debt would be suspended until a full audit is done.
Sowore, who hosted a television presidential interview in Lagos, also stated that his administration would prefer to invest available resources on infrastructure development in addition to other pressing national requirements rather than repaying the N77 trillion debt.
“As President, I am going to halt debt repayment until I audit the debts, and that is what I will do first and foremost when I am sworn in,” he said. I will not pay any debt until the audits are completed properly.
“This is because we need money to fix the country since Buhari has borrowed Nigeria back to the Stone Age; everybody has agreed on that. But our problem is not the debt-to-GDP ratio; it is the debt-to-revenue ratio, which we will aggressively expand.”
“I have said this several times, and I have identified various more revenue sources that have either been hidden, or have not been harnessed the way they should be,” he said of his ambitions to increase the country’s revenue generation if elected.
“I have found taxes owing to Nigerian states by oil firms totaling approximately 4.5 billion. We have discovered around N3 trillion in revenue-generating government institutions that are not being deposited to the federal government’s coffers.
“We have identified cash that could come from the NLNG that is the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas Company, that is over $5 billion that is not paid directly to the federal government but is remitted to the NNPC and the NNPC just quaff the money. As a result, I’ve found a number of other products that can enter the international market at this time.
A lot of natural resources that we have identified that are being sold under the table that they have brought into the official and formal processes that will offer you a lot of money.”
Speaking of subsidies, Sowore argued that what the government refers to as subsidies is a ruse set up by political cabals to profit at the expense of the nation’s common resources.
Against the odds, Sowore stated he would keep Subsidy, stating that: “If you eliminate the so-called subsidy without any plan to support the poor in the country that means petrol would go to 1000 Naira and you are paying slave wages of 30, 000 Naira per month. How do individuals make a living in this country? That is the question we must ask.
“Government should not exist to make life miserable for the citizens? It should exist to discover solutions to problems and afflictions plaguing the people, and that is what we are saying and what we stand for, so they can stop misleading you every year,” he continued.
