The Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines, and Agriculture have urged the National Assembly to critically review the 2023 Appropriation Bill in order to weed out unnecessary allocations contained therein.
In a statement signed by its Director-General, Dr Chinyere Almona, the LCCI said it was not too late to use equity to fund the 2023 deficit proposal.
According to the statement, Nigeria’s approach should not be to continue issuing only debt, especially with the increasingly unbearable burden of interest payments that exposed the country’s fiscal vulnerability.
The LCCI also noted that the overall spending proposal of N20.51 trillion reduced to a non- debt spending proposal of N14.21 trillion once the proposed N6.3 trillion interest payments from the overall spending plan were deducted.
The statement partly read, “We are of the view that while nothing is wrong with the N10.78 trillion deficit, everything is wrong with the plan to issue N10.57 trillion (N8.8 trillion in new commercial loans and N1.77 trillion drawdown on bilateral and multilateral loans) new loans to finance the deficit, at a time that we are already placed on the watchlists of some of our foreign bondholders, and the world is still trying to process our president’s well-publicized call for debt cancelation at the last United Nations General Assembly.
“It is comforting that the 2023 budget is still at the proposal stage. It behooves all well-meaning stakeholders to make constructive inputs to the Presidency and the National Assembly now. Can we consider more efficient alternatives to new borrowings? Can we issue equity to finance the deficit instead of using debt? Can we break from the path in which the Federal Government only approaches the debt markets at home and abroad and never approaches the equity market at home or abroad? Investors invest in debt. But they also invest in equity.”
Speaking exclusively with The PUNCH, the Director-General of the Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines, and Agriculture, Olusola Obadimu described the proposed 2023 budget as a “black hole.”
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