THE Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) has encouraged the Federal
Government to employ equity financing exclusively to fund budget shortfalls, rather than continuing to issue debt instruments with the accompanying burden of interest
payments.
Dr. Michael Olawale-Cole, President of the LCCI, made the advice on Tuesday in Lagos during the Chamber’s quarterly briefing on the State of the Economy, while commending the federal government on the planned electronic payments from the public treasury beginning March 1, 2023.
He said that the amount puts the country’s debt service-to-revenue ratio at 80.6 percent for the time under review, a rate considerably beyond the World Bank’s suggested 22.5 percent for low-income countries like Nigeria while referring to the N5.24 trillion spent by the FG on debt servicing in 2022.
The LCCI president also praised the federal government for its proposed policy
requiring all payments from the public treasury to be made electronically beginning
March 1, 2023, stressing that efficient execution of the policy will deepen the cashless economy.
