DMO to develop medium-term debt management strategy

The Debt Management Office will develop a medium-term debt management strategy to make Nigerias debt management one of the best in the world, its Director-General, Dr. Abraham Nwankwo, has said.He made this known at a training programme for DMO employees on the MTDS on Monday in Abuja.Nwankwo said, "We have always, over the past two-and-half years, wanted to have a medium-term strategy to build on the other initiatives we have taken over the years to ensure that the countrys public debt management remains or becomes one of the best in the world."You will recall that as far back as 2008, we developed national debt management framework and associated guidelines."He said that in the last four years, the DMO, in collaboration with the West African Institute of Financial Management and the World Bank, had established a debt sustainability office.He added that the idea of the MDTS was to enable the country to move to the next level, considering what was being witnessed in global public debt management.The DMO boss said, "The need for it has become even more imperative given the development in the global economy and given that in the next two years, the global economy will be dominated by concerns about public debt management and national debt management in general."Even if we have not appreciated the need before now to have MTDS, we would have been woken up by now to ensure that we have it now. Even developed countries have started seeing serious public debt crises with some of the problems emanating from the private sector."This, he said, had brought to the fore the position and importance of public management in all economies.He said the MTDS would cover minimum of three years and would focus on technical decisions and recommendations relating to the mix of external and domestic borrowing, short-term and long-term borrowing and currency mix, when fully developed.Nwankwo said, "More importantly, it will deal with issues of risk management that are external and internal to the economy. What we are trying to do is to have the highest maturity level of having the technical tool of managing the Nigeria public debt.""The medium-term debt strategy is such a tool to ensure and confirm and consolidate effective, efficient, robust public debt management so that we ensure that when our country does borrow, the resources are managed in such a way that they generate maximum growth and development."
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