‘Fuel Subsidy Removal Inevitable’ 

Director General of the Budget Office of the Federation, Mr Ben Akabueze, has stated the need for urgent and decisive measures Nigeria must take to avert the public debt crisis.
Top among this, he said, is the removal of subsidy on Premium Motor Spirit (PMS).
Akabueze, who said this while speaking on the topic, ‘“The National Debt Burden: Causes, Effects and Realistic Economic Solutions”, at the “Annual Conference/Awards of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators of Nigeria (ICSAN)”, threw light on Nigeria’s debt situation.
“Since 2020, public debt in Nigeria has risen to N32.9 trillion, equivalent to $86.4 billion. It got to N39.6 trillion, equivalent to $95.8 billion at the end of 2021, and this has risen to N41.6 trillion, equivalent to $101.1 billion as at the end of March this year.
“Meanwhile, debt service was approximately $7.7 billion in 2021, an increase from 6.4bn in 2020, and because public debt is domestic debt, domestic debt service is also a significant proportion of debt service”, he explained.
The DG, who was represented virtually by his technical adviser, Olumide Ayodele, said the government believes that investment is required to bridge the infrastructural gap and provide public sector services to the people.
“But the service exceeds the available resources of the government, which leads the government to borrow to finance and use for a critical development project that would eventually improve revenue capacity generation for the economy, improve the business environment and sustained over time to avoid a debt crisis”, he said.
In his welcome address, the President of ICSAN, Taiwo Owokalade, noted that the country has not only amassed huge amounts of debt, but has kept borrowing at a fast rate, thus struggling to service the interest on the debt.