By Enyichukwu Enemanna
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has called on Nigeria’s incoming government to make efforts to drastically reduce dependence on borrowing to fund budgets.
IMF also encouraged incoming Bola Tinubu to roll out policies that will raise the country’s revenue base as he takes over mantle of leadership from the outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari on May 29.
The Resident Representative, IMF Nigeria Office, Ari Aisen gave the advice during a virtual forum on the Nigerian debt situation, where he said the second largest oil producer in Africa needs to concentrate on revenue and expenditure in order the resolve the piling debt profile.
The IMF chief accused the Nigerian government of over-bloating its expenditure, far more than the revenue being generated, a situation that has left the country with a burden of debt.
“How do you reduce the spending needs of the government? That should be the question.
“It is really about fiscal discipline. People should not permanently spend beyond what they generate in revenue because it becomes unsustainable.
“Eventually some people will come and ask for their money back and some will refuse to give further loans,” he said.
Aisen said that the critical thing to do was for countries to be able to rely more on their own revenue to finance their own expenditure.
“That is the autonomy and the Independence that we like to see our member countries rely on,” he said.
A Senior Research and Policy Analyst at BudgIT, a Nigerian firm that provides social advocacy using technology, Mr. Vahyala Kwaga, appealed to the incoming government to address the distortion between fiscal and monetary authorities.
“The Ways and Means is another lump sum of money that affected the economy significantly, in the sense that it compounded the problem of inflation.
“A lot of these monies, according to the president, were used for infrastructure projects. Some were also given to the state governors as bailouts,” he said.
He urged Nigerians to also beam their searchlights on the state governors and their fiscal behaviours.
“The federal system that Nigeria operates allows the centre to provide monies for the states. The question is, how prudent are these monies expended when they are given to the states?
“The transparency and accountability problem we have in the use of funds is extremely problematic at the level osprey states,” he said.
He tasked the legislature to rise up to its responsibility by curbing abuse of process by the executive as witnessed in the Ways and Means Advances.
