I first realised that our country had a financial problem when the postman delivered an electricity bill for £231.02. Heating an entire country was never going to be cheap, but £231.02 was more than I had expected. Add to that the cost of cleaning the country and providing water and you begin to get an understanding of the problem. Our new country was actually spending more money than it earned…we had a National Debt.

However as I have discovered we are in good company because there are very few countries in the world that don’t have a National Debt. Britain for example currently has a National Debt of around £450 billion pounds! That’s a lot of Pounds even by David Beckham’s standards. To help put this in perspective, based on the UK population of 60 million, each British citizen would have to pay £7,500 to cancel this debt.

How did the UK develop such an enormous debt? Simple really, successive governments have over spent. But having a National Debt is not always a bad thing. The trick is being able to afford the interest payments on the debt – in the case of the UK these interest payments are about £20billion a year or £333.33 per head.

Where National Debt becomes a problem is when countries cannot afford to pay the interest. In Africa the level of government borrowing from foreign banks and governments over the years has created enormous interest payments. As a result, many African nations have to spend more on debt repayments than on meeting the needs of their people. Time will tell if this situation can be reversed.

When you compare the interest payments on our National Debt to the problems facing many African countries, then you begin to get a sense that we are actually in pretty good shape. In fact with our current level of debt we are among of the richest nations on earth.