The National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, has said the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration is left with no option but to borrow to revive Nigeria’s ailing economy.
Buhari’s plan to borrow an estimated US$29.9bn from foreign lenders has been rejected by the Senate and opposed by some leading Nigerian economists.
Odigie-Oyegun said Nigeria needed to borrow in order to invest in infrastructure and grow the economy.
The party chairman was quoted to have said this after receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Warri Choral Society at the Muson Centre in Lagos.
This was contained in a statement from his office in Abuja on Monday.
Odigie-Oyegun stated, “If you read the newspapers, you hear the President being advised to pump money into the economy.
“So, the question is, where is the money coming from? Simple, it has to come from somewhere, including borrowing – both internal and external.
“To get this country going again, you have to pay contractors. Some contractors have not been paid for four, five, six, 10 years.
“So long as the borrowing is done, not to pay salaries, which the President Buhari administration will not do, but invested to create opportunities, solve our problems of power and things like that.”
On the anti-graft war, Odigie-Oyegun described the war as a task that must be accomplished, saying corruption was at the core of the nation’s problems.
He described corrupt people as “immoral and lacking in ethics,” adding that Nigeria must rid itself of corruption and its attendant consequences in order to make progress.
The Edo State Governor, Mr. Godwin Obaseki, in his remarks at the event, described the APC chairman as “a man, who has, by the divine intervention of God, changed the face of politics in our country.”
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