From Uche Usim, Abuja
The Director General, West African Institute for Financial and Economic Management (WAIFEM), Dr Baba Musa, has canvassed for cheaper loans for Nigeria and African nations as they battle a flurry of economic headwinds worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic.
He made the push while speaking on sovereign debt in a podcast at a recent event organized by Potomac Group.
Musa said the weak recovery from the pandemic has been further slowed down by rising global interest rates, food insecurity, other impacts of the war in Ukraine, regional conflict in Sudan, and climate change crisis.
He said: “I think what we need is engagement and also a concessional long term financing that will assist African countries to build the infrastructure, that will improve the economic situation in Africa and reduce the heavy economic constraint that we’ve been having.
“Countries need engagements and the situation post COVID has revealed a lot of issues.
We need to understand each other and also need to build a capacity to negotiate and of course obtain soft loans”, he said.
He advised African leaders to be cautious in borrowing and must “From the western countries, we also require some level of engagement and look at the critical needs of Africa and find a way of assisting Africa to finance their infrastructural needs”, he added.
Baba also noted that the Russian/Ukraine crisis has brought about food crisis, shooting up prices to stratospheric heights.
“It has worsened the inflationary position in almost all the countries, so the uncertainty of food security is high.
“Then of course the final pressure is climate change. These are challenges that almost all the countries are facing right now. The global change in weather, we are seeing it as becoming more and more of an issue”, he added.
On desertification, the WAIFEM DG said the development has shrunk lands available for farming, forcing people to leave such areas or become internally displaced.
On the new government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, he said: “A new government is coming in to face a situation of physical constraint but the hope is if the past can predict the future, the new president appears to be someone that has a history of using technocrats that have prerequisite experience in his cabinet and he is known as someone who actually focuses on domestic revenue mobilization.
“At the same time, he is also keen on building infrastructure, he has an excellent track record as a state governor in Lagos, he has had two terms”, he said.