Opara UgonnaFORMER governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi, has stated that borrowing without growing the economy, and lack of savings, is dangerous for the country.
In his words, “if I have the opportunity of being part of Nigeria at the national level, the first executive bill that I will take to the House is that Nigeria must save.”
“We must have at least five to 10 percent of our resources from oil, mineral resources saved for the future generation because every country is saving. We are not saving that is why we have problems. You should bequeath to your children a better place than you found it and that includes saving for them.”
“The first thing that you do when you are in recession is to cut your costs. You cannot continue to live the same kind of life that you lived when things were normal. When you spent your way out of recession, what did you achieve?”
” Before the recession, a bag of rice was about N12,000, we went into recession and when we came out it was N30,000. If you must borrow to come out of recession, you have to put money in a critical sector that will not just pull you out of recession but will grow your economy. They did not tell us how they spent the money borrowed.”
” We are not in America where people will borrow money to consume because America is a developed economy. Our economy requires critical investment in critical areas and the money that we borrowed was for consumption. If you pull people out of poverty criminality will reduce. You cannot throw people into poverty and you go home to sleep. ”
“We have a debt problem and not a revenue problem. Don’t look at your debt to GDP rather look at your revenue to GDP. You cannot have 98 million in poverty and you are talking about revenue. Who will pay you the tax? Look at comparable countries of our size. The Philippines today have revenue to GDP of 14.1 percent, unemployment rate is four percent. Vietnam has about 12 percent and the unemployment rate is six percent.”
“Bangladesh has nine percent revenue to GDP ratio and the unemployment rate is six percent. Our unemployment and under employment is almost 50 per cent. The working population of Nigeria is 120 million, out of which only 55 million are working. If someone is not working, that person can’t pay tax.”
” In my village, 70 percent of the people there do not pay tax. They live off begging. How can they pay tax? The more you pull people out of poverty the more your revenue increases, the more the economy grows for further development. Borrowing is not a problem but what you do with the money matters. You can even save out of the borrowed fund. Japan with over 200 debt to GDP is saving, if we organize ourselves properly we can pull people out of poverty, make more revenue and invest it properly. ” Obi explained.
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