Photo credit: The Punch
I hear Nigeria is about to (if it hasn’t) borrow a humongous amount of between $23b and $30b US dollars!
Yeepa!!
Doesn’t it amount to selling our very future? Unfortunately, most, if not all, of the present political leaders and even those of us who are nobody will not be on this side of the earth in a few years when it’s payback time.
That means we would leave those debts to our children. Something tells me that, in addition to the debts Nigeria had already incurred, they, too, would leave the debts to their own children.
I’m not against borrowing per se! But then, for what purposes have all we’d been borrowing been to us?
When I ask for what purposes, I’m doing so responsibly.
A situation where most of the roads are in a problematic state, where the whole nation has been rendered into a huge generating house because of lack of electricity, where getting pipe-borne water remains a luxury, where the public school system remains a sham, where the nation produces almost nothing, where workers’ take home pay can’t take them home, where many wives have been forced into harlotry, where many men have turned into gigolos and where the leaders have turned against the led gives reasonable people a grave cause for concern.
That’s why the Nigerian IMF chief cried out about what Nigeria is getting itself into. Our own Akin Adesina, who happens to be the current president of the ADB, has also warned Nigeria.
Most discerning people, too, have shouted themselves hoarse against Nigeria, falling into the dungeon that is a debt trap.
But then it’s like the present spendthrifts who happen to be leading Nigeria have a fixated mind. And that’s to spend on behalf of our generations yet unborn. They believe the dim future will always take care of itself.
The lending agencies won’t, unfortunate as it might be, refuse us the loans. You know a Yoruba proverb says, no one will prevent a child from being a leper, if he could live a solitary life in the bush.
I implore Nigerians everywhere to express their feelings about Nigeria’s needless borrowing. We should know that ‘He who goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing’.
I will end this post by using another Yoruba saying: An elder who doesn’t open his mouth to talk when it really matters will soon run like a bow-legged person!
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