President Bola Ahmed Tinubu told lawyers that, making a hundred naira and using N90 of it to pay off debt is a clear path to destruction.
The President disclosed this while giving the opening remark at the annual Nigeria Bar Association’s (NBA) conference in Abuja themed “Getting it Right: Charting the Course for Nigeria’s Nation-Building”.
The President said, “can we continue to service external debts with 90 per cent of our revenue? It is a path to destruction. It is not sustainable. We must make the very difficult changes that are necessary for our country to get up from slumber and be respected among the great nations of the world,”
Reforms will create short-term discomfort
For President Tinubu, the President alluded to making hard reforms to veer the country off that unsustainable path. He noted that these reforms might create short-term negative impacts on Nigerians but encouraged citizens to put future generations above short-term comfort.
“We cannot have the country we desire without the reforms we have initiated. It is painful at the beginning, in the short and medium term, but we must do what we have to do to take this nation to its great destiny.”
“It is not about you, and it is not about me. It is about our generations yet unborn, for whom we must bequeath a great and prosperous country”, he said.
What you should know.
In the World Bank’s fiscal economic outlook for Nigeria in April 2023, the bank noted that Nigeria spent around 96 per cent of its revenue on debt servicing in 2022 up from around 80 per cent in 2021. This the bank says is unsustainable.
According to the World Bank, “the fiscal deficit was estimated at 5.0 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2022, breaching the stipulated limit for a federal fiscal deficit of three per cent. This has kept the public debt stock at over 38 per cent of GDP and pushed the debt service to revenue ratio from 83.2 per cent in 2021 to 96.3 per cent in 2022.”
