Nigeria Has Over 400,000 Abandoned Projects Annually – Don
A university don, Professor Ademola Ariyo on Wednesday said there are over 400,000 abandoned projects annually across Nigeria.
The Professor of Economics at the School of Economics, University of Ibadan, raised the alarm that Nigeria had over 400,000 abandoned projects annually in the last two decades and that the country was enslaved by unbridled borrowing.
The don who maintained that the culture of abandoning projects had become entrenched nationally listed lack of honest estimation of the cost of the projects and lack of will to fully fund it as responsible.
Ariyo stated this in his valedictory lecture delivered at the Faculty of the Social Sciences Large Lecture theatre entitled ‘Knowledge for Sound Economic Judgment’.
Due to lack of sound economic judgment, the don maintained that budgeting in Nigeria had become a license to squander national resources, and personal preferences of Nigerian leaders take precedence over national preferences
The expert in Public Finance and Development Economics disclosed that Nigeria’s representative government had become a curse rather a blessing through the squandering of enormous national wealth.
According to him, unbridled borrowing by the leadership of the country continues to enslave the country to her lenders adding that this is what was responsible for tax regime being imposed on Nigerians.
Ariyo counselled President Muhammadu Buhari and Governors in the country to ensure that only persons with requisite knowledge, character or cognate experiences are appointed into very critical public sector positions.
“Also, we all know that Nigeria relishes in warehousing thousands of abandoned projects as a matter of culture. Available evidence suggests that for over two decades, the number of such projects hovers around four hundred thousand (400,000) annually. Apart from ill-digested and ethically or religiously biased reasons for commencing their implementation, they end up being abandoned due to lack of required cash-backing. Our experience so far portrays our version of representative government as a curse rather than a blessing.
“We ended up with a curious input-focused economic framework, being propelled by a bizarre fiscal operations’ stance that relishes in squandering of enormous national wealth. Curiously too, as national revenue increases phenomenally and geometrically, so does the spate and level of national borrowing.
“Hence, the more revenue we have the more we continue to borrow! This is financial intermediation turned upside down! A major bait driving this bizarre behaviour is the excuse that a nation’s creditworthiness increases with more revenue. The ‘cost’ of our gullibility is manifested by the high proportion of our national revenue being committed to debt servicing”, he said.