The former Minister of Finance, Budget, and National Planning, Mrs Zainab Ahmed, has said the public debts remain sustainable as the country has adequate capacity to repay its debts.
While speaking at her valedictory ceremony in Abuja, Ahmed said, “Despite revenue challenges, the government consistently met its debt service commitments, while post-financing assessments showed adequate capacity to repay loans.”
However, speaking at the launch of the World Bank’s Nigeria Development Update titled, ‘The urgency for business unusual’, the finance minister admitted that Nigeria struggled to service its debt.
She said: “Already, we are struggling with being able to service debt because even though revenue is increasing, the expenditure has been increasing at a much higher rate, so it is a very difficult situation.” Also, in the ‘Macro poverty outlook for Nigeria: April 2023’ brief, the World Bank said Nigeria’s constant fiscal deficit worsened the nation’s public debt stock, with 96.3 percent of government revenue spent on servicing debt in 2022.
In a different report, the Washington-based bank projected that debt servicing would gulp 123.4 percent of the Federal Government’s revenue in 2023. – PUNCH
