TheCable

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has kicked against President Muhammadu Buhari’s plan to obtain $5.5 billion foreign loan.

Buhari wrote to the senate on Tuesday, requesting its approval to obtain the loan, part of which he said will be used to fund the 2017 budget.

Reacting, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) accused the president of mortgaging the future of Nigerian children through “incessant” borrowings.

In a statement on Wednesday, Dayo Adeyeye, the party’s spokesman, said the $5.5 billion Buhari is seeking to borrow is needless and mindless.

The party also said the loan is an attempt to “push the nation down into the black hole of debt that will affect negatively, the future of this nation”.

The statement read: “As a party that governed this nation meritoriously for 16 years and handed over a buoyant economy to the APC in 2015, we are concerned that by the time Nigerians would have the opportunity to push out the APC government in 2019, the economy of the nation would have been damaged irreparably.

“For emphasis, we are dismayed at the rate by which the APC is plunging the nation into debt through local and foreign borrowing without concomitant developmental projects in any sphere of the nation’s economy to justify the huge borrowing.

“The figure released recently by the Debt Management Office (DMO), stating that the nation under the administration of the APC government in the last two years of being in office, has borrowed N7.51 trillion. It is mind-boggling.

“Mind-boggling because all round infrastructural decay has now reached alarming proportions. The roads have deteriorated, the state of power supply has become worse, and there is no increase in wages to match the skyrocketing inflation.

“As a result, workers in educational institutions and other government agencies have spent more time at home observing strike action than they spent at work; insecurity has sky-rocketed beyond what anyone can imagine, while those in power continue to delude themselves that they are providing plausible leadership for the country.”

The party asked Buhari to explain to Nigerians how the “several huge” sums borrowed in the last two years “in the name of financing infrastructural development in the country” have been used.

“The data shows that since President Buhari was sworn-in, the nation’s debt has risen by 61.96% in only two years,” it said.

“As major stakeholders in the Nigerian project, we are worried that if the national assembly does not stop this latest demand for foreign loan, the money when released, will go the way of other loans obtained in the last two years without any tangible result to show for it.”