We Have To Take To Fund Infrastructure, Woo Investors - Buhari

In a justification of the loans taken by the current administration, the President, Muhammadu Buhari, said that the country has "to take loans to fund infrastructure" to attract investors."

The president said this during a virtual meeting with members of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC) in Abuja.

Buhari lamented the deplorable conditions of the roads, rail, and power in the country, stating that the loans were necessary to fix these problems.

He said, “We have so many challenges with infrastructure. We just have to take loans to do roads, rail and power, so that investors will find us attractive and come here to put their money."

The president also said that the poor state of Nigerian roads had stripped it of its status as the go-to country for trans-shipment of prodcuts.

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Speaking on the "collapse of the oil market, Buhari said, “We have to accept that decision; otherwise they (Middle-East producers) can flood the market and make the product unviable. So we have cooperated with what we get. With oil, we are in a difficult situation. The politics of oil is that the less you produce, the less you earn."

And on the country's pivot to agriculture and the need salvaging of jobs and foreign exchange, he said, “For us to bounce back to productivity, especially in agriculture, the unemployed with many of them uneducated had to be persuaded to go into agriculture.

“If we hadn’t gone back to the lands we would have been in trouble by now. That is why we virtually stopped the importation of food thereby saving jobs and foreign exchange.”

The president said that the pandemic had brought about untold hardship on the country, claiming that “COVID has reduced us to the same level as developed countries.

“We are lucky we went back to the land. We eat what we produce. We are doing our best to secure the country and provide infrastructure for investment to be viable in the country."