Former Vice President, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, has raised the alarm that Nigeria’s economy cannot survive under the burden of paying whooping sum of N610.2 billion to service debt.
He lamented that the amount is more than the combined budgetary allocation to education and youth development for the year 2019.
The Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in a statement titled: “Can a nation survive like this?” by his media adviser, Paul Ibe, on Thursday, expressed worries that the nation’s economy under the President Muhammadu Buhari-led All Progressives Congress (APC) administration is nose-diving.
Drawing the attention of stakeholders in the Nigerian project to the existential threat affecting Nigeria, Atiku l urged immediate action to address Nigeria’s unsustainable debt burden.
The former Vice President said the National Bureau of Statistics for the first quarter of 2019 (January to March 2019) revealed that Buhari’s government “spent a whopping ₦610.2 billion on debt servicing for domestic debts. Note that these monies were spent on servicing (paying interest) debt, not in repaying debt.
“To put this in perspective, in the first three months of 2019, what Nigeria has spent on servicing domestic debts, so far, is more than the combined entire budget for education and youth development for the whole of 2019.
“How did this happen? How could an administration double our national debt from ₦12 trillion in 2015 to ₦24.9 trillion today and still have no tangible evidence of development to show for it?
“The reason is that no matter how much resources you give a man who does not know how to create wealth, it will never be enough.
“If the current trend continues, Nigeria will have spent ₦2.5 trillion on debt servicing by the end of 2019, a figure that is more than our capital budget. Can a nation survive like this?”
Atiku warned that the deeper the nation goes into unsustainable debt, the more of her independence Nigeria loses to her creditors.
He said “the older generation should sacrifice for the youth” adding “We must not be a vampire generation that squanders the financial lifeblood of Nigeria and bequeath financial bondage to the next generation.”
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