STILL BORROWING TO FINANCE FRAUD

Borrowing is not bad if the money is put to good use, writes Josef Omorotionmwan

People look at loans and borrowing as things that are abhorring, disdainful and sometimes offensive. Even in the Christendom, it is not unusual to hear Christians asking God to make them lenders and not borrowers, particularly in their New Year Resolutions.

We think that such people are simply short-changing themselves by constricting themselves to the smaller spaces. Unknown to them perhaps, most viable projects in this world are financed on borrowed money. At the point of success in the big thing, people would pray to God to provide them with people that would lend them money. Which contractor on winning a good contract, will not rush to the Priest to conduct a High Mass for him to get a worthy financier of that contract?

Essentially, there is no harm in borrowing. There is blessing in getting a lender at the point of need: But there is harm in borrowing and not repaying, and there is harm and shame in not putting the borrowed money to the purpose for which it was borrowed. Put differently, if you borrow, you must repay and the borrowed money must be applied to the purpose of the borrowing.

Our founding fathers understood this most perfectly. We remember Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (1912-1966), the first Prime Minister of Independent Nigeria! In his time, the late Prime Minister secured a World Bank loan of USD $209 million for the purpose of constructing the Kainji Dam with one quarter of this amount used to resettle people displaced by the construction of the dam and its reservoir, Kaiji Lake. The loan was judiciously applied to that project and it was completed, and tirelessly so.

The Kainji Dam has been extremely useful in its catchment area of Niger State and in a good part of Northern Nigeria, for energy provision and for irrigation purposes. The loan has repaid itself perhaps a thousand times over and today, it is as alive and as useful as when it was provided in the First Republic.

That loan stands out as the only one that Nigeria ever got and put to proper use, courtesy of the Abubakar Administration.

      There is something peculiar with habit. Once formed, it must be nurtured. That’s one way of explaining why the successive military juntas that came after the Balewa administration still embarked on reckless borrowing and squandermania – despite coming at the oil boom and at a time when “Money was not Nigeria’s problem but how to spend it” – putting it in the elegant phraseology of a leader in that era.

But not to worry. Things were not yet off hand. In spite of the squandermania of the succeeding military juntas, they could still point out a few infrastructure they provided during their years of occupation. Those fly-overs all over Lagos; the National Arts Theatre; the FESTAC Jamboree and the associated environment, sea and airport development and expansions, could be pointed out as some of the things they were leaving behind. Indeed, they finally left but not before borrowing us into infamy.

Then came the Fourth Republic. By the time the President Olusegun Obasanjo-led administration arrived in 1999, Nigeria had burned to the limits and all avenues to further borrowing had become blocked.

As if that was not enough, Nigeria’s main revenue sources were also closing up fast. The Obasanjo administration soon found that the only way to go was debt forgiveness, if we must survive. Emissaries were dispatched to our creditors around the globe to seek forgiveness of our debts.

In the end, the world redirected that Nigeria must be allowed to breathe. Alas, all the major debts were written off, thanks to the benevolence of the world out there!

Alas it was to be the beginning of yet another reckless borrowing spree! We have been borrowing to finance fraud. The more we borrowed the more we owed. The more we borrowed, the more we produced looting governors, some of whom were richer than the states they governed. The more we borrowed, the more we had bigger thieves in high places; the more we borrowed, the more we had government officials who single-handedly lifted hundreds of billions off our treasuries. The more we borrowed, the more schools and health systems became comatose; the more we borrowed, the more our highways became death-traps. Alas, development died!

We borrowed and borrowed, and so even, we have borrowed our way into shame – the point at which we no longer call a loan by its real name. We are now at the point where we must spend 98% of our revenue for debt-servicing and the end is not yet in sight!

Recently, as the exchange rate of the Naira to the dollar was heading for the rooftops, we quickly ran to the Afreximbank for a bail out. We got a $3 billion facility to cushion the effect of the exchange rate unification, whatever that means. The federal government quickly issued a statement that the Afrexim Facility was not a loan. After all, we were going to repay with our crude oil.

If that is not a loan, what is it? Is crude oil not money? For us, a loan by any other name is still a loan! We have now borrowed ourselves into an embarrassing situation; and if we must survive, we must continue to find lenders. It is a terrible situation, and that’s putting it mildly. Nobody can even say for sure, how much we are now owing.

Where exactly did the bottom fall off in all this? Corruption and total lack of accountability. An Accounting Officer would heave N180 billion off the public-till. Nobody is called to answer the supplementary questions – how did he carry it? In how many trailers did he convey that money? Did he carry it alone? Or was it such that he could arrange it in a briefcase and by some magic, simply walk away? The truth is that the man is today walking our streets in unfettered freedom! The moral message is that crime pays in Nigeria; and if you must do it, just do it big!

In Nigeria, corruption is pervasive. There is the strong belief out there that those big haulage in government may not really belong to the identified thieves. They may be acting as mere agents to some unidentified principals. That is one way of explaining the difficulties in prosecuting and punishing the offenders. 

In and out of office, the big principals, permanently have their fingers on the protection buttons of the agents. That’s why the agents act with raw impunity. 

Apparently, Nigeria has long pushed itself to the wall but it is not yet in the well. Going by the Bolowa example, in the new awakening we now seek, it is clear that our future is in the past. Our original institutions – the family, the school, our churches and mosques as well as the other government institutions like the National Orientation Agency (NOA), etc., – must wake up to their original responsibilities, assured that a new Nigeria is still possible. 

Omorotionmwan writes from Canada