Nigeria suffering from broken public finance — Soludo

Former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Chukwuma Soludo, has said that the nation’s economy was suffering from a broken public finance and needed an urgent strategy to fix it.
In an interview. in Nsukka, Enugu State, Soluda said that the bloated recurrent expenditure of the federal government required a courageous action to balance the capital/recurrent budget provisions.
The federal government’s recurrent expenditures have consistently hovered around 70 per cent to 80 per cent, leaving capital with merely between 20 per cent and 30 per cent that are never fully funded.
According to Soludo, the level of borrowing must also be closely watched to avoid a situation in which all public funds would go into debt servicing in the future.
“I think our public finance is broken, period. The public finance is broken and needs to be fundamentally fixed.
“I think the debt issue is simply a symptom of that part of the manifestation of the public finance chaos, or the broken nature.
“We are on a debt cliff and something must happen to the revenue base. You have over N100 trillion economy in nominal terms and you collect between 4-6 trillion revenue, Soludo said.”