Leadership (Abuja)
Clem Khena-Ogbena
27 September 2008
Abuja — The World Bank has said that it was not willing to compel Nigeria to obtain fresh external loan, as the country can currently boast of enormous foreign reserves and excess crude proceeds.
According to the bank's country director, Onno Ruhl, who made this known in a report monitored on Economic Confidential website on Wednesday, the world's apex bank is rather interested in collaborating with Nigeria on policies and programmes aimed at reducing, to its barest minimum, the country's poverty level.
Ruhl further explained that the bank is also an economic adviser with vast local and global experiences on how countries can manage their wealth for sustainable economic development, apart from being a money lender, stressing that the greatest challenge of any partnership is positive result.
He noted "the Nigerian budget is by and large more than the World Bank can ever bring to Nigeria. We can do a programme in Nigeria for a year for about 1 billion dollars, that's a significant amount of money but it is quite small compared to the government budget."
According to him, however, if Nigeria is genuinely committed to achieving its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it needs all the monies it can get because the country is a very large one, citing over seven million girls who do not go to school.
He added that there is need for all resources to be channeled into various goals as long as the country does not create debt problem, and it can borrow from financial institutions, saying that the major thing is translating the money into real result.
Re-affirming the bank's desire to support Nigeria's development process with emphasis on poverty alleviation in particular, Ruhl stated "that way I will like to articulate that my responsibility as a country director is to say that we can do that effectively by supporting the government's programmes which is in articulating the 7-point Agenda driven by vision 2020.
The country director explained that the World Bank funds are on extremely concessional terms with 10 years grace period, emphasising, "The first 10 years you don't pay anything."
"The administrative charge is 0.75 per cent and the repayment period often 10 years is for another 30 years. If you take that money and just put in US treasury bonds, it would be making a lot of money so it would be a good deal. But my conscience would not allow that because it would not impact on the community."
He, however, cautioned Nigeria against recreating the debt crisis it had in the past, arising from foreign loans.
He stated, "We are, however, more concerned in helping Nigeria to develop programmes and approaches that make the government to spend its money effectively. Let the money translate into services of development like decent levels of clinics available to all Nigerians and those clinics have medication and when pregnant women go there they don't have to die for lack of care, because they get the kind of care they need. If you put good water sources in the village, a lot of girl children would be free to go to school because they don't have to fetch water all day long. If you invest wisely in electricity sector, more businesses will come back to life. Likewise, investment in road should not be limited to construction but maintenance too, for safer transportation. That's what I mean by spending money judiciously and effectively."
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