Nigeria and the World Bank are in talks for $ 1.5 billion of budget support funding, a senior staff of the World Bank revealed on Friday night.
This information was shared by Razia Khan, Chief Economist for Africa and the Middle East of the World Bank via her X handle.
The Bank in collaboration with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is having its annual meeting in Marrakech, Morocco.
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Wale Edun, Nigeria’s Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, and Yemi Cardoso, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, are both in Marrakech, attending the World Bank-IMF meeting.
Reacting to Razia Khan’s tweet, Andrew @afalli tweeted, “Waste of everyone’s time. Anything less than like $10bn isn’t going to move any dials.”
An energy and public policy expert who spoke to BusinessDay and prefers not to be mentioned agreed with Andrew that what the World Bank is offering won’t be able to make the desired impact. “Anything short of $10 billion would be like a drop in the ocean,” the energy expert said.
He, however, admitted that there was nothing wrong with what the bank was offering, only that it wasn’t enough.
He advised that the federal government should reach out to the IMF for more funding so that such funds could be used to clear the country’s foreign exchange backlogs.
