(GIN) —Tumbling oil prices have been a gift to some, but they’ve blown a huge hole in Nigeria’s balance sheet, which some fear may set the once promising African economy into a tail spin.
What could be worse than finding you have a trillion-dollar budget gap and an insurgent group that threatens to hit whatever oil wells remain? This week, Nigeria startled the finance markets by announcing plans to ask the World Bank and the African Development Bank for a $3.5 billion loan.
CNN Money bluntly headlined the story, “Nigeria Is Running Out of Cash.”
Nigeria’s finance minister, Kemi Adeosun, denied the loans were an “emergency” measure but rather merely the cheapest way possible to fund the deficit. “It’s my strategy for borrowing for capital projects,” she told the Financial Times.