Continued from yesterday & Concluded
…That matters because public borrowing cannot be evaluated solely by looking at the liability side of the balance sheet. We must also examine the asset and development side. What infrastructure was created? What communities benefited? What schools, health interventions, agricultural programmes, erosion control works or social infrastructure were delivered? How much was actually spent in Anambra? What was the State’s counterpart contribution? What proportion of the approved financing was disbursed? What remains unfinished? And what measurable economic or social returns did the projects generate?
If the projects were substantially implemented, then the proper public finance assessment is not simply “Obi borrowed money.” It is whether the borrowing was properly authorised, whether the financing was efficiently deployed, whether the projects represented value for money, what assets or public benefits resulted, and whether the resulting debt burden was fiscally sustainable.
Conversely, if any facility was substantially undisbursed, poorly implemented, abandoned or subjected to significant cost overruns, that too should be disclosed.
The public does not need only the liability column. It needs the complete balance sheet: what was borrowed, what was actually drawn, what was owed at handover, what was subsequently repaid, and, critically, what Anambra received in return.
There is a broader economic principle here. Not all public debt is economically equivalent. Borrowing to finance productive infrastructure or human capital investment whose benefits extend over many years is fundamentally different from borrowing to finance recurrent expenditure that disappears as soon as it is spent. The relevant test is therefore not simply whether government borrowed, but whether the borrowing financed assets or services whose benefits justified the fiscal obligation and whether the repayment profile was consistent with the State’s capacity to pay.
That is the standard that should apply to every administration.
The same discipline must apply to the latest State Government publication.
There is no doubt that the publication establishes something important: the Obi administration entered into financing arrangements for development projects, and significant balances on some of those facilities remain outstanding today. That fact should neither be denied nor obscured.
But there is a considerable distance between saying that and saying that US$92.353 million was the debt Peter Obi handed over in March 2014. The document, as presented, does not establish that proposition.
It is also important to distinguish between political responsibility and accounting responsibility. A governor may approve or sign financing arrangements on behalf of a State, but the debt is ultimately an obligation of the State, not a governor’s personal debt. If we are going to attribute responsibility across administrations, therefore, the standard should be evidence rather than rhetoric.
How much did Obi’s administration contract? How much was actually drawn before he left? How much remained outstanding? How much did the Obiano administration subsequently draw? How much did it repay? What did subsequent administrations inherit? What has been repaid since? What remains outstanding today?
Those are the questions that matter.
The most useful response from the Anambra State Government would therefore not be another press statement. It would be the publication of the complete 2014 financial handover report and supporting schedules, together with the debt statements for the eight facilities identified in its latest publication. For each facility, the State should disclose the original commitment, amount disbursed before March 17, 2014, outstanding principal on that date, subsequent disbursements, repayments by each administration and the current outstanding balance.
That would settle much of the argument.
Conversely, anyone using the one-page 2014 handover summary to argue that Anambra had zero debt should equally produce the complete financial statement and reconcile it with the DMO’s contemporaneous records. The DMO’s December 2013 records plainly show that Anambra had recorded external and domestic debt at that time.
In other words, neither side should be allowed to cherry-pick the number most convenient to its political narrative.
The US$123.771 million is not, on the face of the latest publication, the debt inherited in March 2014. It is the aggregate of original facility amounts at signing. The US$92.353 million is explicitly a June 2026 outstanding balance. And the one-page 2014 financial summary is not a comprehensive debt statement.
So where is the March 2014 figure?
That is the question.
Until that figure is produced and reconciled facility by facility, the public is being offered fragments of a financial history rather than the financial history itself.
And that is precisely why this debate should move beyond “zero debt,” “US$123.7 million borrowed,” and “US$92.35 million inherited.” Those slogans may serve political arguments, but they do not substitute for accounting evidence.
The facts are in the transaction records. They are in the loan agreements, subsidiary financing arrangements, disbursement schedules, debt ledgers, repayment records, audited accounts and DMO statements. They can tell us what was contracted, what was actually drawn, what was owed on March 17, 2014, what happened thereafter and what remains outstanding today.
Anambra does not need another war of numbers. It needs a reconciliation of the numbers.
That is the only way to separate inherited debt from subsequently incurred debt, loan commitments from actual borrowing, and political claims from verifiable public-finance facts.
And on an issue involving the financial history of an entire State, that is not too much to ask. It is the minimum standard the public deserves.
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