Years after leaving office in 2007, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has criticized the amount of debt the nation possesses.
Obasanjo said that he had almost $70 billion when he left the country, which included $25 billion in a special “excess crude” account and a $45 billion reserve.
Kayode Akintemi of News Central Television conducted an exclusive interview with the former president on Thursday.
Obasanjo, who bemoaned the nation’s inadequate leadership, said that his government had a debt overhang of almost $36 billion but had managed to decrease it to roughly $3.5 to $3.6 billion when he left office in 2007.
What he said: “I came in 1999 and met $3.7 billion in the reserve. And I have told you, we were spending $3.5 billion to service the debts. That’s what we had.
“By the time we left eight years later, with debt relief, when I came in, we had a debt overhang of close to $36 billion. By the time I left, with the debt relief and clearing what we had to clear, the quantum of debt that I left was about $3.5 to $3.6 billion from over or around $36 billion.
“At the same time, the reserve that was $3.7 billion when I came in went to $45 billion. At the same time, we had what we called “Excess crude”, which is what is in excess of what we budget and what we actually sell the crude. Normally, we are conservative in budgeting, we call it “Excess crude”. So, we had in it about $25 billion. When you add that to the reserve, we are talking about $70 billion.
“Now, the point is that I left in 2007. Today between 2007 and 2024, all that amount of money has gone; all of it. Not only that, but all the money they made all that period had gone. And today, we owe more than we owe when we came to government in 1999.”
