The Senate on Wednesday approved a fresh loan of $16,230,077,718 billion for President Muhammadu Buhari.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also approved is another sum of \u20ac1,020 billion and a grant of $125 million from the 2018-2020 External Borrowing(Rolling) Plan of the Federal Government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Senate approval however comes curiously even when the federal lawmakers admitted not having any knowledge of the terms and conditions of the loans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Amid speculations that the terms and conditions are written in Mandarin (Chinese) language; the Senate added a proviso that the approval terms and conditions of the loan from the funding agencies should be forwarded to it for proper scrutiny and documentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
President Muhammadu Buhari had on 6th May, 2021 requested Senate approval for $36,837,281,256 billion plus \u20ac910,000,000 and grant component of $10,000,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A close look at the details of what was approved however revealed that what the federal lawmakers signed off for Buhari to borrow is different and higher than what the President himself requested in September as contained in the addendum to the 2018-2020 Borrowing Plan submitted to the Senate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Buhari had in that communication in September requested Senate approval for $4,054,476,863, \u20ac710,000,000 and a grant of $125,000,000 for the implementation of various projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Wednesday, and after an extensive deliberation, the Senate approved external borrowing in the sum of $16,230,077,718 billion \u20ac1,020,000,000 and a grant component of $125,000,000 million for Buhari.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Explaining the increase, Chairman, Senate Committee on Local and Foreign Loans, Clifford Ordia said the committee had in the process of working on the request by the President noticed that out of all the previous loan requests (totalling $22.8billion) approved by the National Assembly\/for Buhari, only $2.8 billion representing 10\u2105 has been made available to Nigeria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The Committee therefore notes that the great pressure placed on the human and financial resources of the National Assembly to approve loans under the Medium Term External Borrowing Plans is unnecessary”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The loans are to be sourced from various funding agencies like the World Bank, and three separate institutions from China namely: China Eximbank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China Development Bank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Others are Africa Development Bank, French Development Agency, European Investment Bank, European ECA\/KfW\/IPEX\/AFC,International Capital Market and Standard Chartered Bank\/SINOCURE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nigeria plans to spend the loan to boost its agriculture, power supply, digital economy, education, environment and the health sector.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Senate on Wednesday approved a fresh loan of $16,230,077,718 billion for President Muhammadu Buhari. Also approved is another sum of \u20ac1,020 billion and a grant of $125 million from the 2018-2020 External Borrowing(Rolling) Plan of the Federal Government. Senate approval however comes curiously even when the federal lawmakers admitted not having any knowledge of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":602,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-congress-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecongresswatch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecongresswatch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecongresswatch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecongresswatch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecongresswatch.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=657"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thecongresswatch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":662,"href":"https:\/\/thecongresswatch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions\/662"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecongresswatch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecongresswatch.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecongresswatch.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecongresswatch.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}