CSOs warn, Nigeria risks losing foreign assets to reckless borrowing

Blames national assembly for country’s rising debt woes

Says reckless borrowing responsible for Nigeria’s policy challenges

Plans orientation exercise for 10th National Assembly

Civil Society Organizations, (CSOs) have raised concern over Nigeria’s rising debt profile describing it a ‘debt trap’ already worsening the country’s crisis ridden economy and costing the nation its foreign assets.

The CSOs consisting the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Center, (CISLAC) and Christian Aid in partnership with Transparency International, TI), noted that Nigeria is presently in a debt crisis with a fiscal deficit well above the statutory threshold of 3 percent , an increasingly unsustainable debt profile and a rising debt servicing that has been worsened by rising interest rates among others.

Speaking at a media briefing yesterday in Abuja, Executive Director, CISLAC, Auwal Musa-Rafsanjani, lamented that the National Assembly has failed in its constitutional duty of checkmating the excesses of the executive arm of government and is therefore largely to blame for the current debt crisis the nation is facing.

He said due to the ‘rubber stamp’ attitude of the legislators who sign or approve loans that the executive has been taking in the last few years without fully grasping its implication to the economy and generations yet to come, Nigeria is now in a debt trap as the government keeps taking loans from private creditors hence deepening the debt crisis and increasing human cost.

Auwal pointed that “barely two decades after the buyback deal by the then President Olusegun Obasanjo, from the Paris Club debt relief agreement, Nigeria is already in another debt crisis with an inevitable human cost.

“With limited access to further financing on concessional terms and with a growing presence and influence of private creditors in its debt profile, Nigeria’s national debt is growing and increasingly putting the country in a precarious position.

He said “part of the crisis we have is that when the new or incoming legislators come, they hardly get any orientation and that what CISLAC and Christian Aid will be working on. We will organise orientation on our debt situation, our economic situation to all the relevant committees when they form those committees. Read More from original source