Nigeria Owes N159 Trillion. Nobody Is Required to Explain Why.

On March 31, 2026, President Tinubu sent a letter to the National Assembly asking permission to borrow $6 billion from abroad. The request came with the usual language attached: deficit financing, infrastructure priorities, fiscal responsibility, the N68.32 trillion budget framework. Lawmakers approved it, as they tend to do. The story lasted a news cycle and then moved on.

What the letter did not mention is that Nigeria's total public debt had just crossed N159.28 trillion as of December 31, 2025. That number was up from N144.67 trillion the year before. Four years ago, in 2021, the entire debt stock stood at N33.13 trillion.

In four years, it grew by 380%.

I want to pause on that figure before moving anywhere else, because the way it tends to get reported, buried in budget documents or mentioned briefly in economic round-ups, does not give it the weight it deserves. 380% is not a rounding error. It is not the result of one bad year or one unusually large infrastructure investment. It is a direction. And the direction has been consistent, unbroken, and almost entirely uncontested by anyone with the authority to contest it.

A BudgIT analysis of the 2026 approved budget breaks down what that N159.28 trillion is actually made of. Roughly N84.85 trillion sits in domestic debt, mostly FGN Bonds and treasury bills sold to Nigerian banks and pension funds. The other N74.43 trillion is external, owed to multilateral lenders led by the World Bank's IDA at $17.32 billion, commercial creditors through Eurobonds, and bilateral lenders including China at $5.06 billion.

That last number tends to dominate the public conversation about Nigeria's debt. The China figure is real but it is not the biggest exposure. The World Bank alone holds more than three times what China holds. The Eurobond holders hold about the same as China. Nobody talks about those creditors the same way, possibly because the China narrative is more politically useful, possibly because questioning multilateral debt feels less acceptable. Either way, the conversation the country is actually having about its debt is not quite the same as the conversation it should be having.

There is also a currency dimension to the N159 trillion figure that almost never gets mentioned. Between 2023 and 2025, the naira lost more than 250% of its value against the dollar. That devaluation alone inflated the naira value of Nigeria's external debt, even in years when the country was not taking on significant new foreign borrowing. Part of the jump from N33 trillion to N159 trillion is not new debt at all. It is old debt that got repriced when the currency fell. That does not make the number less real. If anything, it is an argument for being more careful about how much new external debt gets added to a balance sheet that is this exposed to exchange rate movements. The government has not made that argument publicly.

Here is the figure that matters more than the total: debt service to revenue.

The debt-to-GDP ratio, the number officials reach for when someone raises alarm, sits between 40 and 50 percent. That sounds manageable. Countries like Japan and the United States carry ratios several times higher and remain solvent. The argument works if you treat debt as a static fact and GDP as an income stream. The problem is that Nigeria's government does not spend GDP. It spends revenue. And revenue is a much smaller, much less reliable number.

In the 2026 budget, debt servicing is projected at N15.81 trillion. That is roughly 45% of what the government expects to collect. The actual numbers from 2025 are worse. By the third quarter of that year, debt service had reached N12.52 trillion against revenue of N18.63 trillion. That is a ratio of 67.2%. Some reports put it higher, at 72% for parts of the year.

Two out of every three naira the government collects goes straight to debt repayment. Sometimes three out of four. Before a hospital sees money. Before a road gets fixed. Before a teacher gets paid. The debt service happens first, automatically, and then the government works with whatever is left.

BudgIT describes this as a debt trap, and the description is accurate. The government borrows to cover the deficit. Debt service consumes most of the revenue. The remaining shortfall forces more borrowing. Each new loan adds to next year's service bill. Next year's service bill widens next year's shortfall. The cycle feeds itself.

There is also debt that does not appear in the N159.28 trillion headline at all. The Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Company owes the power generation companies roughly N6.6 trillion in unpaid obligations. This sits outside the official public debt stock. It is not counted. But it is money owed by a federal entity, and at some point it will have to be paid, and when it is paid it will come from the same fiscal space that is already stretched. Multiply that kind of arrangement across dozens of government-owned enterprises with weak oversight and patchy financial disclosure, and the official figure starts to look like a floor rather than a ceiling.

The $6 billion borrowing request is not unreasonable on its own. Governments borrow. Infrastructure requires financing. The question that should accompany any new borrowing request is the one nobody in Abuja seems required to answer: what exactly is this money for, and how does adding to a debt service bill that already consumes 67% of revenue make the underlying problem better rather than worse?

The 2026 budget includes N29.19 trillion in deficit financing through fresh domestic and foreign borrowing before that $6 billion is even counted. That means debt servicing will rise again next year. The year after that as well. Each cycle locks in a little more of the budget in advance, before a single policy decision gets made, because the money is already spoken for before it arrives.

I write about the gap between what Nigerian law promises and what Nigerian institutions deliver. That gap runs through this story too, just in a different register. There is a legal framework for public debt management in Nigeria. There is a Debt Management Office. There are budget documents and fiscal responsibility legislation and National Assembly oversight committees. None of those things have slowed the trajectory from N33 trillion to N159 trillion in four years. None of them have required anyone to explain, publicly and in plain language, whether the borrowing that produced this number has been worth it.

Nobody in Abuja is required to answer for any of this. That is the accountability gap that runs underneath all the others.