The Debt Management Office has said the Federal Government can borrow up to but not more than $22bn in the 2017 fiscal year. The DMO, in its ‘Determination of Borrowing Limit for 2017’ report, stated that the Federal Government could borrow up to 5.89 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product estimated at $374.95 billion.
According to the DMO, the country’s new debt management strategy also entails balancing the sources of debt to ensure that more resources are borrowed from external sources where the interest rate is lower than interest on funds from domestic sources.
The nation’s total debt stood at N19.16tn as of March 31, 2017. Segmenting the components of the national debt, the DMO put the Federal Government’s domestic debt at N11.97 trillion. The domestic debt component of the states stood at N2.96 trillion as of March 31.
