REGARDING THE FG’S INCREASING BORROWING PROFILE, PDP AND LP CRITICIZE IT AS SCANDALOUS.

The federal administration was criticized by the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party on Thursday for allegedly depending too heavily on domestic and external borrowing to manage the economy.

While the PDP criticized the federal government’s excessive borrowing as scandalous and opaque, the Labour Party said that the country’s foreign loan application process lacked transparency.

Both political parties participated in a panel debate on maintaining openness in the management of Nigeria’s foreign debt on AIT’s Focus Nigeria, where they invited the spokesmen of three other major political parties.

Speaking on behalf of the PDP Presidential Campaign, Mr. Charles Aniagwu stated that President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has seen a three-fold increase in Nigeria’s foreign debt compared to all previous governments combined.

He criticized the current administration’s excessive N17.1 trillion foreign borrowing and bemoaned the fact that the nation was paying up to N310 billion more to service the loan in the final quarter of 2022 than it was making.

Aniagwu voiced unhappiness with the area the funds were used for and other conditions associated with the borrowed cash, noting that the facts of government borrowing were opaque.

“Atiku is not simply looking at where we are owing,” he declared. I remember that I was among those who went to China to obtain a $1 billion loan for the construction of the railway connecting Abuja and Kaduna and four separate airports. We had to be extremely explicit about what we were taking and the payment arrangements.

“How many years you have set aside as a moratorium. We determined at that time that the income we would receive from the several airports as well as the rail track would even be sufficient to repay our debt.