Responding to this post by Nurudeen Adeyemi, you always tag me (thanks), but here you did not state my position to help your audience. The average oil revenue during Jonathan was $76 billion per year , Buhari’s was $47 billion per year, using your data (I assume they did not include 2017 data). But if you look at borrowing, Buhari has made up his oil shortfalls via borrowing. My comment on that feed was this: money is money, borrowed or via oil revenue as when you spend Naira, it does not have a marker with “they got me from oil” or “I am borrowed”.
What Buhari did not get in oil, he had borrowed from pension, IMF, etc and at the end, he HAS more money (per year) than any of the administrations you mentioned. More so, the oil revenue that came during OBJ, Yar’Adua (the best among them), GEJ etc went into paying military era debts and because of that their budgets were LOWER.
Last Jonathan’s budget was N4.962 trillion in 2014 but Buhari’s last budget was 10.59 trillion naira in 2020. Even using absolute official rates in both 2014 and 2020, Buhari has more USD; Jonathan was around $24 billion using N200/$ in 2014 and Buhari $28 billion using N380/$ in 2020.
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So, what you are sharing is irrelevant because even though oil revenue has dropped, President Buhari has used loans to jack up spending, more than any president in both Naira and USD. However, as I noted in the piece you cited, the thinking into the spending has not been strategic, and that is why it seems he does not have money even though he is spending more!
Comment on LinkedIn Feed
Comment: Even though President Buhari has used loans to jack up spending, more than any president in both Naira and USD, as you’ve said, he has projects to show for those spending but the previous administrations have no project to show for their spending that’s the issue.
Response: That is another debate which I do not want to follow up. I simply responded to debunk the “scarcity” you created on your feed. I am happy we are in affirmative now. You tagged me; so, I simply wanted to explain my side of the point. Mr. Buhari has a reason to be borrowing – he is fighting a war. Yes, that he is spending more is understandable. I only responded to debunk that he had no money because oil revenue went down.
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