Irrespective of how or what led to the huge debt of Nigeria & other developing nations, I want to plead the case that 'some of the debts should be forgiven' because most of the current developed countries benefitted from similar debt-forgiveness in the past. Nigeria needs help to jump-start its "Road to Recovery".
Also corporations, individuals & municipal (city) governments in developed countries who fall in the same predicament would have declared bankruptcy & legally "walk-away" from the loans.
I will list some precedents for debt writeoffs:
In the 1930s, the U.S.A. forgave debts owed by Britain, France and Italy.
Germany's economic recovery after the Second World War was fueled by generous aid packages and a writeoff of much of its debts in 1953, from some European countries & the U.S.A. {part of which was the "Marshall Plan"}.
Ironically, Germany & Japan (another recipient of huge aid package & debt write-off from the U.S. post-WW2) are the 2 major G-7 countries that are against debt write-off for Nigeria & other developing countries.
In 1998, Canada wrote off $900 million in development assistance loans made to highly indebted poor countries. {However, 18 of these countries still owe Canada another $1.2 billion; mainly to the Export Development Corporation and the Canadian Wheat Board.}
In 1989, Canada wrote off $672 million in loans to some Commonwealth and Francophone countries made by the Canadian International Development Agency.
Between 1992 & 1996, Canada wrote off another $328 million that was owed by Egypt, Tanzania and Ivory Coast.
The G-7 countries raised $100 billion to bail out East Asian countries in 1997.
Corporations & individuals also benefit from bankruptcy laws. The 1992 bankruptcy of Olympia and York, the Toronto-based holding company of the Reichmann brothers, is a case in point. The collapse of their real estate empire left billions of dollars of debt. Unsecured creditors were paid 15 cents on the dollar.
But the brothers kept sizable private fortunes -- and Paul, the eldest, managed to leverage his to regain control of Canary Wharf in London, the construction project that tipped Olympia and York into debt in the first place.
Like Mr. Reichmann, municipal (city & county/local) governments can also escape a crushing debt load. California's Orange County, for example, declared bankruptcy in 1994.
Donald Trump, the New York/New Jersey real-estate mongul resuscitated his "empire" by declaring bankruptcy some years back.
In probing the Chapter 11 bankruptcies of corporations like Texaco, Johns-Manville (major Asbestos manufacturer), and Airlines {such as Eastern, America West, TWA, & Frank Lorenzo's Continental Airlines}, it is clear that bankruptcy is pursued by managers more and more as a strategy and that it is becoming accepted by the business community as a viable option, and not just a last-ditch solution. {A good reference for this is Kevin J. Delaney's book [published by The University of California Press in February 1992] titled "Strategic Bankruptcy: How Corporations and Creditors Use Chapter 11 to Their Advantage".}
But in the case of an impoverished Third World country, the game is played a different way.
The indebted countries have repaid their original debts many times over. Between 1981 & 1999, they had paid $2.9 trillion in interest and principal on loans that amounted to only $568 billion in 1980. Mozambique owes about $5.8 billion, roughly the cost of two of the U.S.A.'s B2
Stealth-Bombers (airforce planes).
The U.S.A. can easily forgive about $1 billion (or so) that Nigeria owes to U.S.A. & U.S.A. interests (out of the total debt of about $30 billion that Nigeria owes to institutions like IMF, World Bank, Paris Club, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Russia, U.S., other countires & other financial banks in developed countries). On the 30th day of August 2000, the President of the U.S.A. {William Jefferson Clinton (aka: President Bill Clinton)} went to Colombia with an aid package of about $1 billion to support eradication of illegal drugs produced in Colombia.
I believe that President Clinton should have written off about $1 billion that Nigeria owes to the U.S.A. & U.S.A. interests during his recent visit to Nigeria, to truthfully show America's support for Nigeria's recovery.
I believe that I have made a strong case for forgiveness of part of Nigeria's debt.
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