$29. 9b to kickstart economy, pay contractors, says Odigie-Oyegun

The All Progressives Congress (APC) has said that President Muhammadu Buhari plans to spend the $29.9 billion, he wants to borrow, on reviving the comatose economy and paying contractors, some of who are being owed for up to 10 years. APC’s National Chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, said Sunday night that the President did not plan to spend the money on trivialities, noting that the loan would not be used to pay salaries, but to develop infrastructure.

A statement from his office yesterday in Abuja quoted the APC’s boss as making the assertion after receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Warri Choral Society during a classical music concert the group held in his honour at the Muson Centre in Lagos. According to Odigie-Oyegun, “If you read the newspapers, you hear the President being advised to pump money into the economy. So, the question is where is the money coming from? Simple! It has to come from somewhere, including borrowing-both internal and external. To get this country going again, you have to pay contractors. Some contractors have not been paid for four, five, six to 10 years!

“The borrowing is not to pay salaries, which the President Buhari administration will not do, but invested to create opportunities, solve electricity problems and things like that. To allow people to have money to consume, to buy goods, to pay for services, so that factories can produce. So, it is that cycle. We must kick-start the economy and to do this it will need money, lots of money,” the APC national chairman told journalists after the concert.

Odigie-Oyegun also defended the ongoing fight against corruption as necessary for the country to make progress. “That is a task (anti-corruption) that must be accomplished because it is at the bottom of all the ills of this country. When you are corrupt, you are immoral. When you are corrupt, you don’t have ethics, when you are corrupt, you lose the distinction between right and wrong. When you are corrupt, even life does not mean anything to you. So, we must get it under serious control for this nation to have hope of making any progress,” he said.