Ado-Ekiti, May 21, 2023 – Chief Afe Babalola, a legal luminary, on Sunday advised the President-elect, Bola Tinubu, to seek immediate debt forgiveness from Nigeria’s creditors on assumption of office.
He said forgiveness or cancellation of the country’s debts would relieve Nigeria of huge resources being used to service debts.
Babalola spoke in Ado-Ekiti on the sideline of a public lecture on “Smart Infrastructure: Catalyst for sustainable development,” delivered by Prof Bamidele Adebisi, a Professor of Intelligent Infrastructure System.
He expressed sadness that the country’s increasing debt stock was not being channeled appropriately, but was being spent on questionable priorities.
Babalola attributed the increasing debt stock to lack of discipline and gross inefficiency in governance and urged the incoming administration to cut expenditures and undertake reform that would scale down governance cost as well as ease fiscal burden.
He said that Nigeria’s debt was capable of undermining the determination of Tinubu to bring the desired changes that Nigerians had been yearning for.
Babalola enjoined Tinubu to take a cue from former President Olusegun Obasanjo who spent first two years of his administration globetrotting to seek forgiveness for the country’s debts.
He said debt forgiveness would relieve the country of the burden of using over 90 percent of its revenue to service debt, while the freed resources could be deployed to development of infrastructure.
“Today, we are the worst debtors in the world. We owe trillions of dollars.
“We are borrowing more even when the current government has few days 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 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,” Babalola said.
Prof. Adebisi, in his lecture, stressed on the importance of technology across all sectors, saying technology had moved up the rung of ladder to act as a catalyst for societal development.
He said that technology is now a game changer to address global challenges in the areas of agriculture, transport and food production. (GBN)
