The World Bank is yet to receive any request to restructure Nigeria’s debt. This is according to the global financial institution’s president, David Malpass.
As reported on BizWatch Nigeria, the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed said the Nigerian government was working on exploring ways to have its debt with World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) restructured.
According to Ahmed, the Federal Government (FG) had hired consultants to facilitate the process of restructuring the country’s debt servicing obligations.
“It is a fact that Nigeria’s debt has increased over the last three to four years and this increase in debt was occasioned by the different kinds of exogenous shocks that the country faced, which are not unique to Nigeria. The situation we have by the 2023 projection is that we will need about 65% of our revenues to service debt.
“Unfortunately, the cost of debt service is rising, because of the growing interest rate globally, which is resulting also in higher debt service costs. But our projection from the debt sustainability analysis is that Nigeria is able to cope with its debt service in 2022 as well as in 2023.
“We have been engaging financial institutions to look at the opportunity to restructure our debt to further stretch the debt service period to give us more fiscal relief. Those are some of the things we want to achieve in this meeting,” Ahmed said.
Reacting to Ahmed’s claims, Malpass, during the ongoing annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Washington, the United States (US) capital, maintained that Nigeria’s debt sustainability would only be assessed should President Muhammadu Buhari’s government request for debt relief.
With debt servicing gulping more than the country’s revenue, Nigeria’s debt had increased to N42.84 trillion at the end of June 2022.
