Afe Babalola challenges Tinubu to pursue debt forgiveness for Nigeria

A Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Chief Afe Babalola, on Sunday, charged the incoming administration of Ahmed Bola Tinubu to pursue debt cancellation with multi-lateral lenders.

The lawyer, who is the founder of Afe Babalola University in Ado Ekiti, spoke on the sideline of a lecture titled: “Smart infrastructure: “Catalyst for sustainable development,” delivered by a professor of Intelligent Infrastructure System, Bamidele Adebisi, at the university.

Babalola said debt forgiveness would help to relieve Nigeria of its huge foreign debts, adding that a lion’s share of the country’s resources was deployed into servicing the loans.

He lamented that the debts were deployed on projects that did not benefit Nigerians.

The lawyer challenged Tinubu to learn from ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo who spent the first two years of his administration pursuing debt forgiveness for the country.

READ ALSO: ‘It’s illegal for Nigerian govt to shut down varsities because of election’ —Afe Babalola

Nigeria’s debt profile stood at N77 trillion as of May 9.

Babalola said: “Today, We are the worst debtors in the world. We owe trillions of dollars. We are borrowing more even when the current government is few days to go. And we learned that our incoming President has gone to look for those who are coming to invest here. Have you ever heard of any man who is very stupid enough to invest in a bankrupt country? They will never do so.

“I expect the incoming President to learn from Obasanjo who spent the first two years of his administration going round to beg for forgiveness of our debt. Nobody is coming to invest here when you can’t even pay the interest due on the huge debt that we owed.”

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