Foremost legal luminary and Founder of the Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD), Chief Afe Babalola, has asked the Bola Tinubu-led administration to prioritise debt forgiveness for Nigeria from creditor-countries and multilateral financial institutions.
Babalola, who noted that a lion share of the country’s resources were being used to service debt, said the forgiveness or cancellation would help relieve Nigeria.
He spoke yesterday in Ado-Ekiti on the sidelines of a lecture, ‘Smart Infrastructure: Catalyst for Sustainable Development’, delivered by Prof. of Intelligent Infrastructure System, Prof Bamidele Adebisi.
Aare Babalola, who lamented the current state of the country’s debt profile, worried that the debt were not channeled appropriately but spent on questionable priorities. He attributed the ballooning debt profile to lack of discipline and inefficiency of government spending, urging the incoming administration to cut expenditures and undertake reforms that would scale down cost of governance cost and ease fiscal burden.
He admonished the president-elect to take a cue from ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo who spent the first two years of his administration globetrotting to seek forgiveness for the country’s debt from its lenders.
“Today, We are the worst debtors in the world. We owe trillions of dollars. We are borrowing more even when the current government is few days to go. And we learnt that our incoming President has gone to look for investors. Have you ever heard of any man who is very stupid enough invest in a bankrupt country? They will never do so.
“What I expect the incoming President to do is to learn from Obasanjo who spent the first two years of his administration going round to beg for forgiveness of our debt. Nobody is coming to invest here when you can’t even pay the interest due on the huge debt that we owed.”
Prof. Adebisi stressed on the importance of technology across in all sectors, noting technology has moved up the rung of ladder to act as a catalyst for societal development.
He stated that technology has become a game changer to address the challenges in the areas of agriculture, transport and food production.