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Debt Relief: A Motion Without Movement By Muhammad Bashir
Media commotion and official drumbeating have characterized the Nigerian nation in recent times over a rumored debt relief gesture granted by the Paris club of lender nations to Nigeria under conditional circumstances. The confusion initially saw presidential spokesperson, Mrs. Remi Oyo finance minister, Mrs. Okonjo – Iweala and their likes rejoicing with chest – beating, reveling how Obasanjo’s wasteful trips abroad is now yielding positive development to the country. To cap it all, the dream (because the whole jamboree was coming to the me like a dream) ended with the preside nt himself making a live nationwide broadcast about the relief and the aborted reform conference he hatched and sponsored illegally on Tuesday 26th July 2005 However, even if his media friends (never say enemies), viz: Isaiah and company did not go to the Paris club website to discover that the whole saga is anything but official skullduggery or, if put mildly, an official exaggeration – there is nothing rejoiceable to me and to those who share the same intellectual psyche with me if the Paris club will call off everything that has to do with Nigeria’s debt today or tomorrow.
Why – because I bet to say neither the Paris club nor its puppet ally in the villa is ready to make sacrifices for the betterment of Nigerian economy. If anything, both could be held responsible for the long – term calamities impeding any positive aim at liberating the needy class and the tattered economy from the parasitic shackles of neo – colonial machinations. More so – the huge debt on Nigeria so far would have been used, at least, fairly to make life in Nigeria better has Obasanjo been a patriotic leader of the country. Despite his public pontification about the issue of the foreign debt, some of us are aware of how Obasanjo has been borrowing to the tune of $ 5 billion from the World Bank every year since 1999.
Most notably – the history of Nigeria’s foreign indebtedness could start as far Back as from the 1970s, and it was the same Obasanjo who set the pace presidential borrowing abroad. He secured a loan close to # 1m before the second republic politicians came to plunge the nation into a deeper debt- hole of $ 18 billion by December, 1983. Regardless of euro – western economic pressure on him, Buhari’s determined effort to rescue the country saw the total debt reduced to a mere $ 12 billion in a period of twenty months. After the palace coup, General Babangida reversed the nation to its former economic tragedy first, by engaging the virtual majority of Nigerians in a blindfolding opinion poll jiggery-Pokery over the debt is sue and second, by making his way underground to stage an outrageous debt buy-back scam involving some $ 6 billion with the international monetary fund (I M F) between 1988 and 1993. That brought Nigeria’s debt back to its earlier rate of $ 18 billion. Most wonderfully, the Abacha administration did not borrow a Kobo from the international lender institutions and it left with the death of Abacha in June 1998, some $ 11 billion disposable in the nation’s foreign reserve. The successor regime of Abdussami Abubakar was neither borrowing nor paying off a kobo until May 1999 when the Aso Rock villa was dubiously handed over to Chief Aremu Obasanjo as a supposed elected president of Nigeria. And despite the regular increase in the per barrel price of Oil at the international market, the present regime has been borrowing close to $ 5 billion e very financial year from 1999. One wonders where the huge sales Nigeria is making from its daily export of crude oil and the extra foreign loans from the Britton Woods are being pocketed as neither the central nor the state governments can present any proof of economic development in the last six years. What is always presentable as we have come to learn so far is to say the least, a catalogue of official lies, deceit and deception that have driven so many people away from attending any national T.V or Radio news in the country. It was even ridiculous and amounts to intellectual assault by Obasanjo on the Nigerian people that the he recently went to the us in search of loans and financial aids to settle after retrenching, a mere seventy-five thousand from the population of Nigerian civil servants. The 2004 budget was initially drafted with a 25 dollar Oil price benchmark but the nation spent the year earning a substantial excess between $ 15 and $ 20 are per barrel. Meanwhile, the price of crude Oil at the international market is being put at $ 60 per barrel and the Nigerian masses are daily living in hunger, misery with bleaker scenario impending. While the borrowed monies have always found their ways in to private bank accounts belonging to the government officials, the excess Oil windfall are usually wasted on frivolities. Since his coronation in May 1999, Obasanjo in collaboration with his hired cohorts has engaged the vast sums from our Oil proceeds in one form of altruistic squander mania or the other. Recall the voter registration exercise, the COJA, commonwealth summit, the national I.D card scheme and of late, the reform confab which Obasanjo illegally hatched, hosted and single- handedly sponsored in his bid to remain a virtual life president post 2007. Another extravaganza is, meanwhile, in the pipeline under the criminal guise of a national census.
The recent round of media-hyped euphoria over an alleged or if you like, anticipated debt relief concession is anything but deception as it is not meant to make, in anyway, economic development achievable in the third world countries. It is only hatched to be a conspiratorial matter of give-and –take between the Paris club and the Nigerian authorities. We are not new to seeing such bilateral collection particularly a euro - African one. Take for instance, the aggregate loot from Nigeria’s treasury in Swiss banks is in the vicinity of $ 170 billion, and the total foreign debt is merely some $ 36 billion. The loot can pay off as many as three times our foreig n debt-but the European powers will never deduct the amount we owe them from that slush fund and hand us back the remaining money. In fact, the Europeans are a party to corruption in Africa despite their bogus posturing. They don’t care if African countries are looted dry since the dirty lucre goes to them to build further their buoyant economies with so much ease. Otherwise- the looting in Africa would have been halted.
Whether or not the debt relief issue is a factual one as Obasanjo’s henchmen will like to state (as some have already started) counting it among the fruits of his multiple, wasted trips abroad, I dare repeat there is nothing to celebrate in the whole matter. I needn’t tell any Nigerian that Obasanjo and his retinue of the so - called economic intelligence team do not care if the nation will be sold to the World Bank provided the price is nice to them. Were they not the ones commanding him to sell off our common heritage in the pretentious names of privatization and Deregulation? Besides, were it not the so – called clubs of creditor Nations that have made Nigeria a testing ground for all sorts of voodoo economic policies conceived overnight by the western economic emperors? Who taught Obasanjo the very ironical formula of reducing his country’s workforce by 40% when the entire nation’s populace is daily wallowing in perennial unemployment? In essence, the ongoing national uproar over the issue of debt relief is a sheer waste of time and resources as the whole debt relief concession, even if true, will never make a life better for the common man in the Nigerian streets. And this is why – it remains purely a motion without movement.
Muhammad Bashir wrote from Kaduna and can be reached at bashirsenior@yahoo.com
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