By
Khadijat Teeta
With a barely controlled rising sense of panic, I read the above article on BBC news online. Chei, this is wonderful, Nigeria the Giant of Africa cannot service its debts much less repay them. What a monumental crisis. Joseph Sanusi, CBN Governor is quoted as saying he had decided to halt all debt payments rather than eat further into our reserves. Is the situation so bad that Sanusi has to be the one to make such a decision? Still in the midst of it all nobody is putting the responsibility squarely where it belongs.
Jerry Gana ran around with his blindfold strategy, as usual, saying ‘it is not true that Nigeria has suspended servicing its foreign debts this year’. Our president is blaming plunging oil revenues, looted money and failed privatisation plans. What do you expect, when the man had counted, distributed and consumed his chickens even before the mother hen laid her eggs.
With an outstanding foreign debt figure of $30bn and our foreign reserves standing at $8bn (down by 20% from December), things look very grim and irredeemable. Yet we are still collecting more and more debt, at the federal and state levels at exorbitant interest rates from sharks like the World Bank and using it to fund stupid things like stadiums.
When will it stop? Do we have a hope of liberty from this burden, this quagmire that is slowly but surely swallowing us? When will we learn that debt is crippling and creditors are happy to keep us dangling on their nooses forever more. We had better crawl out from under our blanket of prejudice, ignorance and corruption and call our government to order. We have to tighten our purse strings, begin cutting our cloth as close fitting as possible.
Sound economic management is beginning to look like a pipe dream and a mythical concept to most Nigerians. More worrisome still is that we are leaving our young generation, who don’t even know what a strong economy looks and tastes like, without ingredients to cook-up this strong economy. If they had been given a sight or taste of it they might hazard guesses as to what ingredients are required in the recipe. But we are leaving them with nothing, no…. that’s wrong, we are leaving them with less than nothing, we are hurting them more than we can ever repair.
Oh, our children, what a mess we are leaving for them to inherit, what a burden. Yet people refuse to see the logic of operating an Islamic system of non-interest financing, where we would only be paying what we borrowed (at its current value)! Drastic times require drastic measures as they say and it is time we pulled our collective heads out of the sand and faced our problems head-on. Tomorrow is too far away, let correction begin today.