The Anambra State Government, yesterday, published the public debt records of the Peter Obi administration about 14 years after the former governor left office.

Obi, the presidential flagbearer of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), was said to have accumulated the debt during his tenure as governor of the state.

The incumbent state administration, in a statement issued and signed by the Commissioner for Information and Value Reorientation, Dr Law Mefor, titled ‘Governor Peter Obi and Record of Public Debt in Anambra: Facts Beyond Propaganda and Lies’, stated that Obi left behind debts, including domestic loans and unpaid pensions and gratuities, at the end of his tenure as governor.

The statement read: “Our attention has been drawn to a viral post by a former Governor of Anambra, Peter Obi, on what he described as ‘Phantom Debts and Ecological Loan Fallacy’, which presumably was in response to some statements made on a podcast by the Anambra State Commissioner for Finance.

“We understand that this is a campaign season and candidates often go to extremes to impress. If not that the said post was on his personal handle, we would not have believed that he could have made such wild and verifiably false claims.

“As a government, we are focused 100 per cent on delivering the dividends of democracy to millions of Ndi Anambra. However, when a former governor of the state makes some outlandish claims about the state of public debt he left behind, especially when the current government has been spending billions of naira servicing the same debt, a responsible government owes the public a response in the interest of transparency and accountability.

“We have no time to join issues. We will simply state the facts here for the record.

“Fact No. 1: Obi spent about $4.05 billion (equivalent to N5.4 trillion at the current exchange rate) in eight years and also contracted $123.77 million in external debt, which our government has so far paid billions of naira to service.

“Let’s be clear; hardly any government in the world has zero debt stock. The issue is not whether or not borrowing is good; no business or government can scale significantly without some debt.

“Yes, we converted the audited and published expenditures using the average official exchange rates during the eight years of Obi, and they sum to about $4.05 billion. At the current official exchange rate, it would sum to about N5.4 trillion, and he surely governed to the best of his ability.

“Of course, no government will ever finish the work of development. Obi still left a state without any functioning urban or rural water schemes; increasing insecurity and increased poverty; ostensibly dead public schools and public hospitals with grossly inadequate teachers and medical personnel. Indeed, 44 per cent of all communities in Anambra, 78 out of 179, did not and still do not have any public primary schools, and this administration is only beginning to close the gap.”

“There was also decrepit infrastructure, with huge urban slums. Only about 27 per cent of Anambra residents patronised public health institutions because of poor quality and non-functionality. He even admitted abandoning the public health system at the recent NBA conference.

“We are convinced that many Ndi Anambra would not have minded if Obi had borrowed to fix public schools and hospitals, water schemes and infrastructure, or even to reduce poverty and insecurity. Debt, especially for bankable projects and human capital development, is justifiable. So, Obi should stop being irked as if all debt is bad.

“Fact No. 2: As of the date Obi left office, March 17, 2014, there were, and still are, eight different external borrowings his administration left for his successors.”

Meanwhile, the Presidency has reacted to the ongoing dispute between Soludo, Obi, and the state government over the state’s debts and financial liabilities.

Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, in a post on X yesterday, said Obi had claimed to have left Anambra without debt and challenged him to follow through on his pledge to quit the presidential race if his claim was disproved.

Onanuga wrote, “Peter Obi claimed he left Anambra with a clean slate of debt and even threatened to quit the presidential race if his claims were proven otherwise.”

He added that the Anambra State Government had responded with claims concerning liabilities allegedly left by the former governor’s administration.