Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun has given more reasons why the federal government preferred the borrowing plan of the World Bank and African Development Bank than the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
She revealed that she has had an interesting conversation with former Finance Minister, Kalu Dika Kalu recently on the same issue.
While describing the decision between World Bank and IMF as a huge National Debate, the Minister said “For us, the IMF is the lender of last resort when you have a balance of payments problem”.
“Nigeria doesn’t have a Balance of Payments problem per say. Nigeria has a fiscal problem which is that its major revenue source has lost so much of its value. First of all it lost price and then it lost quantity, so the challenges are different. Now, what the IMF does for you is they give you a program of reforms.
“We are already doing as much reform as any IMF program would impose on Nigeria. So my question is, what would that bring that we are not already doing? What measures would be introduced that we are not already doing? Nigerians want to take responsibility for their future and we must have a home grown, home designed programme of reforms that Nigerians take ownership of because they are painful reforms.
“When you go through this type of adjustment of your economy the reforms are very painful and I think they have got to be home grown. We have got to take responsibility for this ourselves so that when it succeeds, Nigerians are able to say, “Yes! We did this!” I’m not saying that the IMF are bad, but I’m just saying that right now we don’t see that need. We feel that this is a problem that Nigerians created one way or another, and Nigerians must solve.
“What happened with the World Bank was we started with the World Bank and the AfDB last year and they did a joint mission, but when we did the currency adjustment, the amount of dollars or the amount of external money we could borrow reduced. So because we were further ahead with the ADB we decided to close that transaction which we did with the one billion dollars of which like I said we have drawn down $600 million and then we spoke to the World Bank and said well; look, let’s move yours into 2017, which is what we are now doing.
While explaining that Nigeria will get about a billion dollars from the World Bank, she revealed that there are some possibilities of doing a sector specific intervention in the power sector. They are working very closely with us on power. They sent down their high level power team. We spent two very useful days here in Abuja dimensioning the problems in the power sector and the possibility of some support specifically for power.
