By Dipo Olowookere
Minister of Labour and Employment, Mr Chris Ngige, has confirmed that the federal government under President Muhammadu Buhari borrows funds from international sources to pay salaries of workers because of a shortfall in the country’s revenue.
Mr Ngige, while speaking on Sunday night on a programme monitored by Business Post on Channels TV, stated that the government takes borrowed funds from foreign institutions like the World Bank to offset some recurrent expenditures.
Last week, after the Senate resumed plenary, a letter from President Buhari requesting approval for fresh offshore loans of $4 billion and €710 million was read to the lawmakers by their head, Mr Ahmad Lawan.
This generated different reactions from various quarters. The government defended the borrowings, arguing that they were being used to develop the country, especially in the area of infrastructure.
In the midst of these, the Debt Management Office (DMO) said the nation’s total debt at the second quarter of this year stood at N35.5 trillion.
Some Nigerians had argued that the penchant for this government for borrowing was becoming unbearable, especially when the country was using about 98 per cent of generated revenue to service the debts.
But the government has maintained that the loans being taken by the federal government were not above the limit and that the projects being executed with the funds, including rails, were capable of generating revenue to repay them.
Next month, Nigeria will borrow between $3 billion and $6.2 billion from local and international investors through the sale of Eurobonds, adding to the debts already on ground.
While speaking on Sunday Politics anchored by Mr Seun Okinbaloye, Mr Ngige admitted that the central government truly takes funds from international lenders to pay workers.
“Talk in terms of something like the residency training funds; that money was appropriated in 2021. It was delayed because the President signed the supplementary budget [late] but because the resident doctors did not want to listen, they wanted the money to go into their accounts immediately, according to them.
“I told them, no, when the budget office explained [that] we don’t have this cash, the borrowing agencies [like the] World Bank and the rest will give us this money through the CBN (Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in Dollars and we change it to give to you, to pay you and others that are involved because we are funding the budget through some deficits.
“So, I will tell the budget office, expedite action, do this in one week because this is an emergency, these people are not accountants, they don’t understand and we put it down and the budget office rises up to the occasion, works day and night and put it out, Minister of Finance approves, AIE (Authority to Incur Expenditure) and the N4.8 billion is there, waiting to be disbursed.
“Give us the names of those to be paid and they bring (sic) their names through the post-graduate medical college and when the names come (sic), their parent body, which is the Ministry of Health discovered that there were names that were no resident doctors. So, how do you pay?
“Okay, they submitted 8,000 names, they have cleaned them down to 5,800, which means about 2,000+ are not resident doctors. How do you pay them?
“Further investigation, according to the Minister of Health, revealed that some of them are medical officers, senior medical officers, principal medical officers, who hold full appointments, some of them are not resident doctors but because they have been captured in resident doctors association, they want them to be paid; that’s wrong.
“We tell (sic) resident doctors, ‘give them more time to clean up’. They are cleaning it (the list) up, the money is there. So, I expected the resident doctors to go and help them clean up and submit the authentic list,” Mr Ngige said on the programme.
On Monday, while speaking on Politics Today with the same anchor, the spokesman of the President, Mr Femi Adesina, while asked if the government borrows for consumption, answered that the larger part of the borrowed funds is used for critical projects capable of boosting the economy.
Adedapo Adesanya