Former
President Olusegun Obasanjo said Nigeria faces an impending bankruptcy,
with the country’s external debt ballooning by 700 per cent in four
years. But simple fact checking showed the former leader got his figures
wrong on the level of external debt.
He sounded the
bankruptcy alarm as a keynote speaker at the ‘Why I am Alive’ campaign
celebration in Lagos. The event tagged “The Nigerian Story” was created
by the chief executive of Eureka Productions, Caroline Moore.
According
to a report by The Guardian, Obasanjo put Nigeria’s external debt at
N24.947 trillion ($81.2 billion), from $10.32 billion in just four years
(2015).
In his interpretation, Nigeria would need to
commit half its foreign foreign earnings to servicing its current level
of indebtedness.
“Such a situation talks about impending
bankruptcy,” the former president warned. He insisted that “no entity
can survive while devoting 50 percent of its revenue to debt servicing.”
He
explained that the current budget out of which Nigeria spends 25
percent to service debt “is not the country’s total earning; a lot of it
is also borrowing. Simply put, we are borrowing to service what we have
borrowed and yet we are borrowing more.
“I do not need the brain
of any genius to conclude that those who use statistics to dig us
deeper into debt are our enemies: statistics can be used to serve any
purpose, and that is why Winston Churchill talked of lies, damn lies and
statistics, meaning statistics can be made master of lies.”
As
The Guardian reported, Obasanjo called for national dialogue or debate
on Nigeria’s short, medium and long-term plans as a nation.
He
said his biggest worry was that, with the scale of debts the country was
walking into, “there are already fiscal challenges to meet(ing) our
obligations.”
Fact checking however showed that Obasanjo may
have been misquoted on the level of external debt and he also was
quoting outdated debt figures.
According to the Debt
Management Office, Nigeria’s external debt as at June 2019 was $27.1
billion, with the 36 states and Abuja owing $4.2 billion. Domestic debt
level as at June was $56.7 billion, with the states owing $12.9billion .
In Naira terms, external debt stood as N8.3 trillion in June and
domestic debt was N17.3 trillion.
Thus, the former President got it wrong putting the entire external debt at $81.2 billion.
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