Abaribe and Lawan lock horns over Buhari’s $22.7bn loan request

President Muhammadu Buhari’s $22,798,446,773.00 external loan request has been approved by the Nigerian Senate today at its plenary session.

This is coming after the 8th Assembly rejected the request in November 2016.

The decision to approve this loan did not go down well with Minority Leader, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe who raised a point of order. Abaribe was not the only one divided in the red chamber today, some Senators supported the approval, while others kicked against it.

Efforts were earlier made by Senator Adamu Aliero (Kebbi Central) to postpone the consideration of the report to another legislative day.

However, the President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan, said that such a postponement would be counterproductive as the findings and recommendations of the report would have already been debated in the media before the consideration.



Abaribe disagreed with Lawan, praying for more time to subject the various components of the loan to voting, especially the amounts and the lending countries.

Lawan disagreed with him and said that the Senate would only vote on the two recommendations contained in the report.

Abaribe said: “We are going to pass a loan of $22.7billion for which we are being denied the privilege to express our reservations. You are putting us in a very impossible position.

“There are some aspects of this loan that we object to. I want to ask on behalf of our colleagues here that we take these items one by one and vote on them.”

Lawan in his response said: “You (Minority Leader) have not been denied of your privilege.

“I don’t want the discussion on this loan to degenerate into partisanship. My action was not an attempt to muscle you.”



Senator Gabriel Suswam called for calm as he proposed a ten minutes executive session to resolve the matter at hand.

The external loan request is expected to fund critical infrastructure projects under the 2016 – 2018 External Borrowing Plan. Recall that the financial plan was approved by the Federal Executive Council in August 2016 and sent to the 8th Assembly in September 2016 where Senator Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara refused the request, close to four years back.

Buhari made the request a day after the International Monetary Fund warned Nigeria against rising debts. The Debt Management Office has said out of Nigeria’s total debt profile of N25.7tn as of June 2019, external borrowing accounted for about 32% while 68% was domestic.

As at March 2016, the DMO said Nigeria owed N13.8 trillion in debt.