BARELY 19 days before the expiration of his administration, President Muhammadu Buhari Wednesday wrote the Senate asking the upper legislative chamber for approval of a new loan request of Eight Hundred Million Dollars ($800,000,000.00).
In a letter read by the President of the Senate, Senator Ahmad Lawan, President Buhari, who noted that the loan would be utilised to scale up the National Social Safety Net programme, said that the loan would be sourced from the World Bank.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s total external debt as of October 2022 stood at $40.06bn under President Muhammadu Buhari’s government, up from $10.32billion which his government inherited in 2015.
This showed that there was an increase of 288.18 per cent in seven years, according to the external debt stock reports by the Debt Management Office.
A breakdown shows that in 2015, 36 states had $3.27bn external debt while the Federal Government had $7.05bn.
By 2022, states’ external debt rose to $4.56bn, while the Federal Government’s external debt increased to $35.5bn.
The debts included loans from multilateral sources such as the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
They also included bilateral loans from China, France, Japan, Germany and India, as well as commercial sources including Eurobonds and Diaspora bonds.
Nigeria’s external debt ballooned as the naira lost value, increasing Nigeria’s debt service burden and worsening its ability to service debt. The International Monetary Fund recently said that the long-term rate of the depreciation of the naira equated to a loss of 10.6 per cent of its value annually since 1973.
According to the IMF, this rate was 1.5 times higher than the long-term rate of the currencies of other emerging markets and developing economies at 7.2 per cent and sub-Saharan Africa at seven per cent over the same period.
Eighteen-Eleven Media