Nigeria Argues It's Borrowing for Infrastructure
Nigeria is borrowing to build infrastructures according to the government spokesman, Lai Mohammed. This clarification I guess is necessary due to attacks from Nigerians on the regular journeys to debt markets. But the government has put a defense: we're borrowing to build infrastructures.
"Naysayers have recently ramped up their criticism of the Buhari administration from borrowing. These critics are very insincere; we do not borrow for recurrent expenditure neither do we borrow to pay salaries. We are borrowing to build world-class infrastructures that will benefit generations of Nigerians and we have a lot to show from the loans we have taken.’’
He continued, “There’s a road project in every state today. Today we have started the countdown to when the second Niger bridge which successive administrations have built only on paper will be completed.”
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“It is an irony that those who are criticizing us today performed very badly in terms of modernizing our infrastructure even when they served at a time when our earnings were multiples of what we get today. Have they embarked on the kind of infrastructure development we are currently engaged in perhaps there would have been no reason for us to borrow as much as we are doing today.
“For example, in their time they claimed to have spent billions of naira in building infrastructure but as one can see their infrastructure projects are only on the pages of newspapers. Today we are still saddled with looking for resources to build the same infrastructure for which they claimed to have allocated huge resources. We’ll however not be deterred by their antics, we’ll continue to ignore those who have decided to play politics with everything,” Mohammed added.