President Buhari on Tuesday, September 15, explained why his administration resorted to borrowing money.
Speaking in a virtual meeting with members of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC), Buhari said the strategic reason for borrowing was to provide the infrastructure to make the country attractive to investors.
He said “We have so many challenges with infrastructure. We just have to take loans to do roads, rail and power, so that investors will find us attractive and come here to put their money. We have to accept that decision; otherwise, they (Middle-East producers) can flood the market and make the product unviable. So we have cooperated with what we get. With oil, we are in a difficult situation. The politics of oil is that the less you produce, the less you earn. For us to bounce back to productivity, especially in agriculture, the unemployed with many of them uneducated had to be persuaded to go into agriculture. If we hadn’t gone back to the lands we would have been in trouble by now. That is why we virtually stopped the importation of food thereby saving jobs and foreign exchange.”