Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has faulted President Bola Tinubu’s position that borrowing is not leprosy, declaring that the country’s mounting debt is worse than the disease because its consequences extend to generations yet unborn.
Obasanjo, who secured the landmark $30bn Paris Club debt relief for Nigeria during his administration between 1999 and 2007, said that while leprosy affects an individual, excessive borrowing endangered the future of entire generations.
He spoke on Friday at the 3rd Ajibosin Annual Symposium, themed “Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Solve Grassroots Problems and Accelerate National Development”, held at the amphitheatre of the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library in Abeokuta.
Tinubu was recently quoted as saying that borrowing is not leprosy, arguing that his administration only needed to work hard to repay whatever it borrowed.
However, Obasanjo described the argument as absolute nonsense, questioning the country’s increasing debt burden and the capacity of its leaders to manage the economy.
The former President also criticised the policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, arguing that they were not designed to promote Nigeria’s national development and prosperity.
He said, “I was sitting with the former Prime Minister of Britain, Jimmy Callaghan. Callaghan was a sheep farmer. He was being paid four euros per annum on every sheep he owned, and they say we must never subsidise agriculture, and if we subsidise agriculture, we won’t get money from the World Bank or from the IMF.
“World Bank and IMF were not designed for us. They were built before we became independent, and that’s the people who will determine what we do. They are brilliant boys and girls; they went to Ivy League universities, Oxford, Cambridge, and all that. My children went to some of them, including Iyabo. She went to one of those schools; she went to Cornell.
“How can Iyabo be the one who will tell me how I will run my home? These brilliant boys will package everything very well academically. They tell us, and we take it, lock, stock, and barrel, and we use it. For a country of 250 million people, it is boys and girls who are not even married, let alone manage a home, who will tell us what we will do to manage our people, our country, and we swallow it, and we destroy ourselves.”
The former president also decried the loss of value of the naira, saying, “When I started my farm 47 years ago, one naira to the dollar was one naira to one dollar 85 cents. What has Nigeria done in 47 years that we now have N1,500 naira to the dollar? What have we done?
“What do our leaders know, and what do they not know? From what they know, what can they do for us? For anybody to say debt is no leprosy is absolute nonsense. Debt is worse than leprosy, because leprosy destroys only one person. Debt destroys generations.”
The former President also warned the country against blindly embracing artificial intelligence and other technologies without understanding their implications, arguing that innovations introduced by powerful foreign countries could become instruments of exploitation if Africans failed to take control of them.
Obasanjo said the country must determine how artificial intelligence would serve its development priorities rather than allow foreign interests to dictate the country’s technological and economic direction.
He cited the misuse of AI-generated content as an early indication of the dangers associated with the technology, insisting that Nigeria must establish adequate safeguards before adopting innovations.
He said, “I don’t know too much technically about AI. But I know that anything that is not in your control can be abused against you.”
Delivering his lecture at the symposium, a historian and political commentator, Dr Umar Ardo, warned that Africa risked becoming a victim of a new form of economic exploitation through AI if the continent failed to take control of its data, technological infrastructure and intellectual property.
Ardo said although AI offered enormous opportunities for economic transformation and national development, its adoption without ownership, adequate safeguards and local capacity could perpetuate the unequal economic relationships that characterised slavery, colonialism and post-independence dependency.
He said, “For over three centuries, Africa’s principal export was human beings. The transatlantic slave trade carried roughly twelve million Africans across the ocean. The technology of that era — sailing ships, navigational compasses, and firearms that enabled this trade — was not ours. We did not build the ships, set the prices or write the ledgers, though our men, women and children filled the cargoes.
“The most sophisticated technologies of the age were harnessed by others to extract what they valued most: human labour.”
“Under colonialism, the export changed from people to land and raw materials — tin, coal, cocoa, palm oil, groundnuts, cotton, ivory and gold. The technology then — explosives, railways linking mines to ports, steam engines and colonial administrative systems — served an extractive economy. We supplied resources and labour; others controlled the machinery and captured much of the value.”
According to him, the pattern continued after independence, with African countries exporting raw materials while importing finished products and depending on foreign economies for technology, expertise and industrial capacity.
He noted that the country continued to export crude oil while depending on imported refined petroleum products, just as cocoa-producing countries remained largely dependent on foreign manufacturers for finished chocolate products.
He added, “Stand back and see the arc: human beings, raw materials, unprocessed commodities and skilled labour. In every age, Africa has been the quarry and not the miner, the farm and not the factory, the source and not the beneficiary. We were repeatedly assured that each new arrangement was different, fair and mutually beneficial.
“Now comes the age of artificial intelligence, which Africa is urged to ‘leverage’. I do not dispute its arrival or its potential. I ask whether we have considered the terms of participation. Data may become the fourth commodity in this long history of extraction.
“Data generated by our people, farms, hospitals, languages, businesses and public institutions is increasingly valuable, yet computing infrastructure, models, intellectual property and profits remain concentrated elsewhere.”