Let us make sacrifices for “the beautyful ones”

How the IMF loans the present government have taken will affect future generations

Loans are necessary evils.

I grew up in the 80s. Life was good for everyone. The standard of living was great. When I talked to my mom, she told me of the days when a pound was 60 kobo.

In case you are not a child of the 80s, this may not make any sense to you. My mouth gaped wide.

“That means our money was better than the Britons” I gushed like a child learning Economics via informal education. “So how did our money become bad?”

My mom explained that our government loved borrowing money.

“But why do we borrow money if we have crude oil?”

My mom did not answer this question. She retired to the kitchen to do some chores that were more important at the time than the discussion at hand.

This remained an unanswered question at the back of my mind.

As a young child in secondary school, I was obsessed with reading the Guardian newspaper, partly because my dad returned from work daily with one newspaper and I was obsessed with reading as a child.

So on one of those days I read a column from Richard Mofe Damijo, the heartthrob of many women in Nigeria because in those days there was this popular series on NTA called ‘Behind the Clouds’.

I read his column first.

He wrote a story on how crude oil was discovered in Nigeria and how it made everyone glad. That was before they had to deal with the consequence of drilling the land and leaving it non-viable for agriculture, whether planting or fish. Crude oil left behind their bad neighbours named gas flaring and oil spillage. The government have never attended to these problems till date.

So I thought to myself, if Nigeria sells crude oil, why is the nation still so poor that the value of our naira is falling.

“When I grow up, I am going to change that”. I vowed to myself.

Loans are necessary evils because business men take loans to solve problems in their company. The company yields a profit and then pay their loans back.

An individual may also take a loan, build a house on a piece of land and then lease the land out to repay the loan.

When a loan is taken to solve a problem and then when profit comes the loan is repaid, that is a good loan.

An illustration of how loans are used to build businesses can be taken from the richest man in Africa, Alhaji Aliko Dangote.

Aliko is the richest man in Africa. He has businesses that feed other African countries. He has grown rich through monopoly and Export. He has industries that feed Nigeria too. Every other week, I eat Dangote spaghetti. He is a rich man. When he takes a loan, he has businesses he uses the loan on. When his businesses make profit, he pays his loans. That is a good debt.

A bad debt, when you consider a businessman is when a loan is taken and not used on the business but wasted on private jets, trips for leisure, purchase of luxury vehicles and no extra money is made that can be used to repay the loan.

Safe to say, Nigeria does not have a plan to repay all the loans that she has been taken from IMF and China.

Nigeria alleged takes loans to pay salaries of the different states. All the loans we take are to pay salaries. None are for building infrastructure. The only way to generate income is by building infrastructure.

If you were to depict Nigeria in an allegory, it would be of a man digging a hole with himself inside deeper. It is insane to dig a hole in which you are in deeper. This is the picture of what Nigeria is doing.

Recent loan taken:

Facts about the IMF $3.4 Billion loan

     It is an 8 year loan with three years moratorium at 1% interest. It was not a grant. The repayment commences after three years.
The funds are part of IMF’s Rapid Financing Instrument. It comes with terms and conditions to solve its balance of payments difficulties and to describe the general economic policies that it proposes to follow.

  Nigeria will incur $178 million to service the loan for the remaining 5 years. The repayment of capital and interest annually will be a minimum of $735 Million.

                                        -          Oluwatosin M Olaseinde, Financial Expert

A loan that is taken to pay salaries is a bad loan.

There is no plan for repayment is the loan is simply being consumed on expenditure and not on getting assets.

How do you repay a loan when there is no plan and no infrastructure to raise the money that will be used to pay back the loan?

This is the dilemma in which Nigeria finds herself.

Our governments have been taking loans for a very long time but the current government has outdone itself.

One might say that the reason they take out loans is because they will not be the ones to repay the loans.

Or it is that they have enough money for their children to never suffer no matter the fate that befalls Nigeria.

Does Nigeria really matter to anyone?

What about the average Nigerian? Are we obsessed with making ends meet? Are we obsessed with getting our own share of the national cake?

Do we even care a little for our country? Are we even a little patriotic? Do we have love for country?

Do we care about our nation?

There was this popular book that we read in secondary school called “The beautyful ones are not yet born” written by an African writer called Ayi Kwei Armah.

It was about naievety and how politics destroyed a nation. It was a very difficult book for me to read.

For the sake of “the beautyful ones” we have to make better decisions.

We must prioritize for the “beautyful ones”.

We must find a way to make the loans useful for infrastructure that will be built in Nigeria. Let’s do this for “the beautyful ones” who are yet unborn.