President of the Senate, Dr. Ahmad Lawan, has said the National Assembly will always follow due diligence in approving loan requests from the executive arm of government.

Lawan told journalists yesterday in Abuja after a closed-door meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari that the National Assembly will not approve frivolous loan requests from the executive as it will always ask for details before any loan is approved.

He said: “What I want to assure Nigerians is that we are not going to be frivolously supporting or approving loans for the executive arm of government. Whenever we have to approve any loan, we have to insist on the details of what projects will be funded by those loans. We’ll have to look at the conditions that are attached to the loans; they must be favourable conditions before we approve and we will be up to date with our oversight to ensure that what we have approved is directly deployed and on those projects that we have also approved for implementation. So, we will not be frivolous and will not take it lightly to just approve any loan”.

He, however, supported the idea of government sourcing loan to execute projects, saying the revenues are not available while Nigerians cannot be taxed further.

He added: “Our options are really very limited as a country. First, we don’t have the necessary revenues, Nigeria is poor, we shouldn’t deceive ourselves. Nigeria is not rich, given the circumstances we live in, given the challenges we have; our resources are so low, our revenues are so low and therefore the option of not doing anything, just to sit because we have no money, we shouldn’t go for infrastructure development is not even an option worthy of consideration. You cannot keep the economy stagnant.

“Two, you cannot, in my view and judgment, tax Nigerians further for you to raise the money for infrastructure development. Other countries do that, but we have serious situation across the country, so you cannot put taxes on people.”