Nigeria’s New Debt Surge and the Question of What It Bought

When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu took office on May 29, 2023, the first public-debt figure published after his assumption of office was ₦87.38 trillion as of June 30, 2023. By December 31, 2023, total public debt had risen to ₦97.34 trillion, then to ₦144.67 trillion by December 31, 2024, and further to ₦159.28 trillion by December 31, 2025, according to the Debt Management Office’s latest published data. Part of the early jump reflected the formal securitisation of ₦22.7 trillion in Ways and Means advances from the Central Bank, which had existed before Tinubu but was incorporated into the stock in 2023. Even so, the scale of the increase under the new administration is striking. In nominal naira terms, Nigeria added more than ₦71 trillion to public debt between June 2023 and December 2025. That does not mean all of it was fresh cash for new projects; a good share came from exchange-rate effects, legacy obligations being recognised, and deficit financing. But it does mean the Tinubu years have quickly become one of the sharpest periods of debt accumulation in Nigeria’s recent fiscal history.

Much of the borrowing went first to keeping the budget open

The clearest official trail shows that Tinubu’s borrowing has been used primarily to fund fiscal deficits and sustain budget execution. In his 2024 budget presentation, the President said the ₦9.18 trillion deficit would be financed by ₦7.83 trillion in new borrowing, plus privatization proceeds and drawdowns on multilateral and bilateral loans for specific development projects. In the 2025 budget presentation, projected expenditure was ₦47.90 trillion against targeted revenue of ₦34.82 trillion, leaving a deficit of ₦13.08 trillion. The same 2025 speech made plain where budgeted spending was meant to go: defence and security, infrastructure, health, and education were among the largest priority envelopes. In other words, the administration’s debt build-up has not chiefly been a case of borrowing for one or two giant showcase assets; it has been borrowing to keep a large federal spending machine running while also trying to preserve capital expenditure in a period of weak real incomes, high inflation and tight revenues. That makes the debt story less dramatic than a single railway or bridge, but more consequential for macroeconomic stability.

The external money has gone into reform support, power, education and social cushions

Where the money has gone becomes clearer when one looks at the multilateral pipeline. In December 2023, the World Bank approved a $750 million DARES facility to expand distributed renewable energy access to more than 17.5 million Nigerians. In September 2023, it approved an additional $700 million for AGILE to expand girls’ secondary education, with the programme already reporting millions of beneficiaries and thousands of renovated classrooms. In June 2024, the Bank approved $1.5 billion for RESET and $750 million for ARMOR, designed to support macroeconomic stabilisation, revenue mobilisation and protection for poor and economically vulnerable Nigerians. Then in March 2025 it approved another $1.08 billion for NG-CARES, nutrition and basic education. These are not abstract credits. They map directly into electricity access, social transfers, livelihood support, education systems and nutrition services. The problem is political, not statistical: many of these uses are diffuse and household-level, so citizens do not “see” them the way they see a bridge, a refinery or an expressway.

Market borrowing has mostly plugged deficits, not transformed visibility

The same pattern holds for commercial borrowing. Nigeria’s $2.2 billion Eurobond issued in December 2024 was officially designated to finance the 2024 fiscal deficit and support budgetary needs. The $2.35 billion Eurobond issued in November 2025 was similarly earmarked to finance the 2025 fiscal deficit and other government financing needs. This matters because it draws a line between borrowing that expands future productive capacity and borrowing that simply prevents fiscal contraction. In fairness, some deficit financing does protect growth by preventing a collapse in capital spending and social support; Nigeria is not alone in using debt that way. But the harder truth is that debt used largely to close budget gaps creates fewer visible political dividends. It also raises a sharper accountability question: if citizens are carrying the burden through inflation, taxes and weaker purchasing power, the government must do far more to show, in a project-by-project manner, what outcomes have been bought with each dollar and naira borrowed.

Compared with Buhari, Tinubu’s debt looks less tangible on the ground

The contrast with the Buhari years is revealing. Nigeria’s total public debt stood at ₦12.60 trillion at the end of 2015 and climbed to ₦46.25 trillion by December 2022, before jumping further in 2023 as Ways and Means was recognised. Buhari repeatedly argued that the loans were being used for roads, rail, power, water, irrigation and health projects, and official speeches from that period tied borrowing to visible assets such as major road corridors, rail lines, transmission projects and the Second Niger Bridge. Whether one agreed with the pace or cost, the utilization story was easier to tell because the borrowing was publicly associated with hard infrastructure. Tinubu’s borrowing, by contrast, has been more hybrid: part fiscal rescue, part social cushioning, part human-capital investment, part power-sector support, and part exchange-rate inflated revaluation of foreign debt. That makes the administration’s debt strategy economically defensible in some areas, but politically harder to sell because the benefits are spread thinly across many channels rather than concentrated in iconic projects.

The Jonathan comparison is gentler, but instructive

The earlier Jonathan years look modest by comparison. DMO data show total public debt at about $35.1 billion at end-2010, including federal and state obligations, rising to ₦12.60 trillion by end-2015. In that era, Nigeria still borrowed to finance deficits and support public investment, but the debt stock was much smaller relative to today’s naira totals, and the borrowing climate was less shaped by exchange-rate dislocation and post-subsidy fiscal repair. The lesson is not that earlier governments were inherently prudent and the current one reckless. It is that Nigeria has moved into a more expensive debt era, where weaker revenues, a more fragile currency and higher interest costs mean each additional borrowing round bites harder. Tinubu inherited a difficult fiscal structure, but inheritance is not absolution. Once an administration chooses to keep borrowing at speed, it owns the quality of spending, the pace of disclosure and the burden shifted onto future budgets.

The economic implications are now impossible to ignore