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We'll be free of foreign debt this month -Obasanjo

Posted by By ISMAIL OMIPIDAN and JAMES OJO, Abuja on 2006/04/03 | Views: 580 |

We'll be free of foreign debt this month -Obasanjo


President Olusegun Obasanjo on Monday boasted that by the end of this month, Nigeria would not be owing any dime in the Paris Club, even as he said that the country would have a comfortable foreign reserve of between $33 billion and $34 million.

President Olusegun Obasanjo on Monday boasted that by the end of this month, Nigeria would not be owing any dime in the Paris Club, even as he said that the country would have a comfortable foreign reserve of between $33 billion and $34 million.

The President made the disclosure while declaring open the National Assembly Roundtable on Nigeria's Fiscal Responsibility Legislation which had the theme 'Fiscal Responsibility Legislation in Nigeria: Issues and Challenges."
According to him, one of the conditions given when Nigeria got her debt relief was that the country's economy must continue to be run prudently.

He argued that so far, his government has demonstrated, through its reform policies, that it was desirous of putting Nigeria's economy on a sound footing, adding that only recently the IMF approved Nigeria's PSI (Policy Support Instrument).

The PSI, the president explained, was an instrument used to measure how well an economy was doing. And that it was the instrument that ensured that creditors, like Denmark, Austria and Russia, that had hitherto refused to sign the final debt cancellation document, later signed last week.

While commending the initiative of the organisers, Obasanjo, who said that there was no substitute to dialogue, urged the lawmakers to support the Federal Government's effort at repositioning the economy.
Also speaking on the occasion, Chairman of the Governor's Forum and Akwa Ibom State governor, Victor Attah, urged the Federal Government to fill the technical and managerial gaps that are likely to be created when the act is eventually passed into law, by way of providing support for capacity building in the states.

Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Masari, represented by his deputy, Austin Opara, wanted legislators in the country to play key roles in the designing and implementation of fiscal responsibility laws, like what obtains in Brazil.
According to him, the wasteful spending and borrowing at all levels of government would rather continue if there's no fiscal responsibility laws.

The Speaker, who remarked that he was comfortable with the existing cordial relationship between the executive and the legislature, pledged that lawmakers would continue to make laws that would entrench probity and accountability in the country.

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