While speaking with journalists at the ongoing Spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund. The Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun has said Nigeria does not need the help of the World Bank in assessing its debts level.
“We don’t need the World Bank if they want to come and help us, great, but we don’t need them,” the minister said while emphasizing that Nigerians and the Debt Management Office (DMO), are all the FG needs in assessing the nation’s debt level.
She also said the Nigerian government had no other option than to borrow to bring the country out of recession.
The Minister said, “There were two options to end recession; one was cut back, lay people off and wait for oil prices to recover or be more aggressive, expand your budget, take on more debts and invest in infrastructure in hope that you will get growth going to develop more revenue.
We’ve expanded our budget, we pumped money into the economy, we made sure recession was not prolonged.
We are now back into growth, we need to accelerate that growth and focus on revenue mobilization which in turn will reduce our debt pressures. If we were still in recession, we’d have far bigger problems.
I think what people haven’t realized is how much work had to be done to make sure that that recession was as short as possible because that would have caused real pain for the people. We shortened it, we had to borrow to do so and we make no apologies for that.”
