Economic Hardship: ‘I Feel For Tinubu’

The President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Akinwunmi Adesina, has said that he sympathises with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s government over the country’s economic challenges.

Adesina pledged the sum of $1.8bn in budget as support, saying that about $1bn out of the amount will be issued as a concessionary loan to finance part of the 2024 budget.

The AfDB president stated this during an interview monitored by The Whistler.

He lamented that Tinubu has had to deal with inflation, currency depreciation, and the depletion of foreign reserves.

According to him, “It’s challenging to be a president. And I feel for President Tinubu, you know, with what he has to deal with on the macroeconomic side with inflation, with the depreciation of the currency, but also depletion of the foreign reserves to be able to do that. It is very difficult. So, think, you know, my view, and I came here to see him on the 14th of February, is to rally around and support him to succeed, because his success is actually our collective success.

“But there are a number of things that we’ve got to be able to do right, you know when you go to a medical doctor. Or somebody doing diagnostics and they ask you to do a scan. You do a scan, and the scan tells you all the wrong things, right? So, you can either close your eyes and say, I don’t want to see the scan, and you leave with a problem, right? Or you look at the scan and say, well, this is what a scan says and what must I do differently?”

Adesina said the Nigerian government is in dire need of support and the AfDB is willing to provide $1.8bn to aid the country.

 “There are a number of things that we’ve got to change. Our first and foremost is that in dealing with the fiscal challenge that we currently have today, I think the government is getting our strong support. We have a portfolio today of $4.6bn in Nigeria, and this year we expect to have a series of portfolios in Nigeria that we’re going to finance worth $1.76bn, which will include, by the way, a billion dollars of support that we are designing today for budget support and that will help a lot.

“Our loans are the cheapest you can ever find. You know, it’s almost like grants. Extremely concessionary. You pay one point something per cent on a loan. You pay for 40 years, and you have 10 years moratorium on it,” he added.