Foremost lawyer Chief Afe Babalola has asked the incoming administration of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu to prioritise debt forgiveness for Nigeria from creditors countries and multilateral financial institutions.
Babalola said forgiveness or cancellation would relieve Nigeria of humongous foreign debts, adding that lion share of the country’s resources were being used to service debt obligations.
The legal luminary spoke on Sunday in Ado-Ekiti, the state capital at the sideline of a lecture titled: “Smart Infrastructure: Catalyst for sustainable development” by Professor of Intelligent Infrastructure System, Prof Bamidele Adebisi.
Babalola, who lamented the country’s debt profile, expressed sadness that the debt incurred were not channeled appropriately but were spent on questionable priorities.
He attributed the ballooning debt profile to lack of discipline and inefficiency of government spending, urging incoming administration to cut expenditures and undertake reform that would scale down governance cost as well as ease fiscal burden.
The elder statesman said that the debt being owed by the country was capable of undermining the prospects of Tinubu in bringing the desired changes that the Nigerians have been constantly yearning for.
He admonished the president-elect to take a cue from ex- President Olusegun Obasanjo who spent first two years of his administration globetrotting to seek forgiveness for the country’s debt from its lenders.
This, he, said would relieve the country from using over 90% of its revenue from servicing debt and the funds would be deployed for execution of infrastructural projects.
” Today, We are the worst debtors in the world. We owe trillions of dollars. We are borrowing more even when the current government is few says to go. And we learnt that our incoming President has gone to look for those who are coming to invest here. Have you ever heard of any man who is very stupid enough invest in a bankrupt country? They will never do so.
“What I expect the incoming President to do is to learn from Obasanjo who spent the first two years of his administration in going round to beg for forgiveness of our debt. Nobody is coming to invest here when you can’t even pay the interest due on the huge debt that we owed”, he added.
In his lecture, Prof. Adebisi, stressed on the importance of technology across in all sectors, noting technology has moved up the rung of ladder to act as a catalyst for societal development.
He stated that technology has become a game changer to address the challenges in the areas of agriculture, transport and food production.
