Public Debt, Cloud Computing Technology, and Leadership Crisis in the 21st Century: The Role of ICT in Nigeria's Finance Sector

Background of the Study

Contemporary literature on the public debt of nations (Mba, Yuni, and Oburota, 2013; Streeck, 2013; Holtfrerich, Feld, Heun, Illing, Kirchgässner, Kocka, Schularick, Streeck, Wagschal, Walter, and Von Weizsäcker, 2016; Yared. 2019 & Bin, 2020) now abounds which indicates how adversely the phenomenon of public debt has affect established democratic capitalist economies since the beginning of the 1970s. Consequently, most scholars wondered why prosperous and developed nations of the world continued to amass so many public debts to themselves, especially between (1970–2000) (Cecchetti, Mohanty, & Zampolli, 2010 and Sineviciene, & Vasiliauskaite, 2012). The scenarios and consequences arising from haven amassed so many public debts had led to instances where the nations affected become vulnerable to most of the sudden changes taking place in world financial institutions. Changes that put these nations at great risks in areas like the general decline in political participation, growing tax resistance, rising inequality, week economic growth, and rising unemployment. The initial period of fiscal consolidation in the 1990s did not help matters as the records of public debt in the affected nations rose to 'dangerous', unimaginable, and unprecedented heights. The problem is that it has been yet forecasted to continue rising for the next four decades (Streeck, 2013 and Yared, 2019), as a result of the great recession that has been forecasted to followed that period.

Figure 1.

Projection of government debt-to-GDP ratio until 2060

Efforts made by the affected countries to consolidate and salvage their economies seem only to lead to a further decline in the degree of expenditures that states had initially budgeted to make. Ultimately, these scenarios lead to a depletion in the number of state-owned businesses. There is also the problem of the extensive retrenchment of workers. In the light of the foregoing issues, the urgent need to critically interrogate and to seek out ways of addressing the lackadaisical and reckless attitudes which political office holders manifest without much reservations, which itself, plunge their nations into an economic and political leadership crisis, necessitates the timely conduct and writing of this article.