The Federal Government has incurred N950bn new domestic borrowing between January 2022 and March 11, 2022, the Debt Management Office has revealed. The fresh borrowing was disclosed on March 17 in the presentation of the Public Debt Data as of December 31, 2021, by the Director-General of the DMO, Patience Oniha. In the document, Oniha disclosed that the Federal Government was considering all options to raise funds externally. She said, “All options for raising funds externally are being considered. These include funding from multilateral and bilateral sources, the International Capital Markets and the $3.35bn Special Drawing Rights allocated by the International Monetary Fund to the Central Bank of Nigeria.” According to the document, the Federal Government still plans to borrow an additional N1.6tn, while the 2022 debt target for domestic borrowing is N2.57tn. There is also a plan to borrow N2.57tn from foreign creditors, while N1.16tn is expected from multilateral/bilateral drawdowns. In total, the Federal Government plans to add N6.3tn new debts to the current debt stock, which would push the country’s total debt stock to N45.86tn by December 2022. However, the Federal Government, in the National Development Plan 2021-2025, hopes to push the total debt stock to N46.63tn for 2022.

Punch