IMF TROUBLED OVER NIGERIA’S DEBT REPAYMENT CAPACITY

The International Monetary Fund has expressed a deep worry over Nigeria’s ability to repay it’s foreign debt which is currently on the rise.

The IMF is confident because the conditions for Nigeria to keep borrowing are favourable but has expressed it’s worry over the country’s ability to repay.

Adrian Tobias, the Financial counsellor and Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department, IMF recently presented a report on Global Financial stability at the joint annual spring meeting with the World Bank in Washington DC. It was during the meeting the counsellor expressed his fears and worries about rollover risk going forward.

Nigeria’s total debt profile as of December 31, 2018 stood at N24.387tn. This figure increased by 12.25 percentage from N21.725tn in 2017 to N24.39tn in 2018. The debt management office declared that the debt rose by N2.66tn between December 31 2017 and December 31 2018.

However, Nigeria’s Minister of Budget and National planning, Senator Udoma Udo-Udoma has responded to the IMF by deceiving the Nation’s debt as sustainable and he further stated that the debt was unable to affect the Nation’s economy.

Meanwhile, the IMF has stated the obvious by acknowledging the fact that corruption is a major challenge for many resource -rich countries and this has affected the management of their sovereign wealth funds.

In view of this, the Bretton Wood institution ranked Nigeria the second worst performer on the sovereign wealth funds user index only ahead of Qatar in the Fiscal Monitor report which was released on Wednesday.

Other African countries on the list that performed better than Nigeria include, Sudan, Chad, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Libya and Botswana.