Investors: Charity Begins At Home
Investors: Charity Begins At Home
President Bola Tinubu’s economic agenda and strategy and those of former President Olusegun Obasanjo. Like Obasanjo, Tinubu appears to be engaging in international efforts to secure debt relief or debt forgiveness.
It seems like Tinubu is drawing inspiration from Obasanjo’s successful approach. Obasanjo started a flurry of international engagements soon after he was sworn in 1999, mainly to secure debt relief or outright debt forgiveness.
He felt that as an international eminent person and fresh out of a politically-motivated imprisonment, he would elicit sympathy from foreign investors.
Unlike Obasanjo whose emergence posed no controversy, Tinubu’s has been stiffly challenged in the Election Tribunal. He certainly does not have Obasanjo’s mammoth international image.
Tinubu is surging forward with his hunt for foreign investors, fully confident that the removal of petrol subsidy and other policies which are still up his sleeve will attract the investors.
His recent economic missionary trip to India for the New Delhi G.20 meeting appears to have yielded positive results.
Within a record time, he was able to execute his historic debt swap with the Paris Club, whereby Nigeria paid about $12 billion to wipe out our $32 billion debt stock. He laid the foundation for an economic boom and our evasion of the 2008-2010 economic meltdown.
Indeed, Obasanjo’s foundational work eventually catapulted Nigeria to the biggest economy in Africa by Gross Domestic Product, GDP, in 2013.It was not until Muhammadu Buhari came to power in 2015 that Nigeria not only lost ground in our ability to fund our investment, foreign exchange needs, the debts started climbing again.
As of the first quarter of 2023, the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, indicated that our external debt had skyrocketed to over $42.6 billion, up from $41.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022, an all-time high.Tinubu and his team must quickly apply the palliatives needed to re-ignite domestic investment.
A number of sectors, such as our educational, health, energy, agricultural, security, criminal justice, anti-graft, and financial affairs need emergency measures to rebuild a battered system and instil confidence at home and abroad.
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