By Adesina Soyooye
For requesting for fresh loans to the tune of over 5.5 Billion US Dollars, the main opposition has raised an alarm that Nigeria is now an auction market.
In a release signed by its National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, in Abuja, on Thursday, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) said that “the volume of foreign loans being accumulated by President Muhammadu Buhari and his All Progressives Congress (APC), our nation and her people have been placed on the international auction market.”
President Buhari had in.a letter to the National Assembly on Thursday, requested for an approval to take a fresh loan of $5.513 billion. But the PDP is crying foul, saying that the country is sinking under the burden of loans always being taken by the FG.
The party said President Buhari’s moves to take a fresh $5.513 billion (N2.1 trillion) loan in addition to an earlier $22.79 billion (N8.5trillion), the size of 2020 budget, without operable repayment plans, will totally compromise the fiscal integrity of our nation and open it up for economic annexation by foreign creditors. This, it noted, is in addition to N850 billion from the capital market.
PDP: “It is more alarming that the Buhari government, in this fiscal year, cannot muster the capacity to harness the huge resources available in our country to generate even half of the sum of its own budget, but has been going cap in hands to shop for foreign loans.”
The PDP expressed fears that with this situation, the APC administration is practically driving the nation to the brinks while exposing Nigerians to the risk of modern day slavery by mortgaging the country’s future to economic appropriation by foreign interests.
“Already, the situation has created apprehensions, anxiety and trepidation among the citizens, particularly the youths, who are now scared about their future and the survival of our nation under the APC.
“It is even more distressing that this administration cannot account for the loans it has taken so far. In spite of the deluge of loans, the lives of the ordinary Nigerians, on whose behalf they claim to be amassing these debts, have become worse than the APC and Buhari met them in 2015.
“Painfully, even the savings made by previous administrations have been opened up for pillaging by APC leaders and the cabal in the Buhari Presidency”
The PDP called on Nigerians to look beyond our primordial differences and unite in speaking against this accumulation of debts. “It is no longer about political party affiliations, creed, ethnicity, class or age. We all must unite in one voice to save our nation from an imminent collapse.
“Our party holds that rather than mortgaging our nation to foreign interests, President Buhari should immediately cut the size of his government, slash its over bloated budget, clip its luxuries, curb unbridled corruption in his administration and make haste to recover the N14 trillion that was stolen by APC leaders under his watch.
“If the N14 trillion stashed away by APC leaders and the cabal is recovered, our nation will not be in need of these humongous foreign loans,” it said.
The PDP also urged the National Assembly to stand on the side of the people and save the nation by immediately using its legislative instrument to check what it described as the Buhari Government’s “unbridled appetite for foreign loans.”
