Nigeria’s Senate President, Ahmed Lawan, has stated that the borrowing plan by the Federal Government is a necessary burden to fund the growth of infrastructure in Nigeria.
The Senate President disclosed this to newsmen on Friday and revealed that the National Assembly was considering the approval of two loans for the FG.
What Lawan said
“Before us in the Senate are two requests from the executive arm of government; one is to construct and rehabilitate rail lines to the different parts of the country. The other one is to boost the economy directly; investments into agriculture and other real sectors of the economy including mining,” the Senate President said.
“This is because the N32 trillion you are talking about is not all Federal Government debts. Part of it belongs to the states, only that the Federal Government gives the guarantee.
Yet, for us to develop the country we need to build infrastructure. What do we do to raise funds? There are several ways; we are going to raise taxes, can we afford that in the current situation to raise taxes for us to fund the building of our infrastructure?
So, what are the options? Definitely, that option is out (to raise taxes). In fact, what we have is not the kind of infrastructure that will boost our economy. So we can’t raise taxes, the option is to borrow and to borrow responsibly,” Lawan added.
He also said that before the borrowing, the FG had identified the essential infrastructure that could grow the economy, citing that loan requests also included requests for loans guaranteed by the Federal Government for some states.
What you should know
Nairametrics reported this week that the Federal Government was discussing with London-based bank, Standard Chartered Bank Plc, over the funding of two rail line projects expected to cost about $14.4 billion, as against the earlier plans to get the loans from Chinese banks.
