Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, has written a letter to the Chinese President, Xi Jingping urging him to disregard the letter written by Ekiti state governor, Ayo Fayose, who asked Jingping to deny President Muhammadu Buhari of a $2bn loan package.
Gbajabiamila said on Monday, that the President took the right decision on behalf of Nigerians by signing a $6bn investment package with China during his visit to the Asian country.
The All Progressives Congress lawmaker said in the letter, that Buhari got the mandate from the Nigerian people, having overwhelmingly elected him to govern the country.
In the letter – dated April 18 – Gbajabiamila advised the Chinese President to ignore Fayose, stressing that the latter had no authority to speak on behalf of Nigeria.
He also stated that Buhari informed the legislature in the 2016-2018 Medium Term Expenditure Framework that he would resort to borrowing to fund Nigeria’s three-budgeting plan.
The letter reads in part: “Mr. President, perhaps our governor is not fully seized on the way budgeting works at the federal level. The Federal Government of Nigeria has a three-year budget rolling plan captured under a Medium Term Expenditure Framework. The MTEF 2016-2018 has a borrowing component in which the legislature approved for the President to incur both domestic and foreign loans for the purposes of infrastructural development and deficit financing.”
“This MTEF was passed unanimously, by the National Assembly including the six House members and three senators from Ekiti, the governor’s state.”
“I am therefore dismayed as are many members of the National Assembly that the governor would claim that the loan sought from your government did not have parliamentary imprimatur.”
“It is also a fallacy that the country’s debt is being financed with 25 per cent of the Federal Government’s annual budget as there is something in economic and legislative borrowing parlance called nominal debt service where a portion of borrowed monies in this case about N1.3tn stays within the country’s financial system. Such are the intricacies of national debts, aids and loans.”
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