Nigeria's public debt accumulation has become both a fiscal emergency and an intergenerational moral question, according to experts who gathered at the 17th Blakey's National Tax & Economic Conference in Lagos.
The conference, themed "The Master's Borrowings in Nigeria," brought together economists, finance professionals, and policy analysts to dissect a debt profile that has expanded by more than N57 trillion in roughly 18 months under the current administration.
Dr. Patrick Ossai, citing data from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), and the Debt Management Office (DMO), laid out the numbers: public debt stood at approximately **N87.38 trillion** when President Bola Tinubu took office in May 2023. By December 2024, it had climbed to **N144.67 trillion**, and by December 2025, it reached **N149.28 trillion**. Projections point toward N193 trillion by the end of 2026 if current trends persist.
The **2026 budget of N68.32 trillion** — 2.8 times the size of earlier budgets — carries a **deficit of N23.85 trillion**, with domestic borrowing of N10.07 trillion projected to cover the shortfall.
"Not just the scale — the speed with which they are accumulating this debt is frightening," Dr. Ossai said, noting that annual borrowing under the current administration has been claimed at N49 trillion, compared to N4.7 trillion under the previous administration.
The conference also examined troubling fiscal ratios. The **debt-service-to-revenue ratio peaked at 97% in 2023** — meaning N97 of every N100 earned went to debt repayment — before improving to approximately 48–49% in 2025, aided partly by GDP rebasing. The debt-to-GDP ratio rose from 29.4% in 2023 to 42.5% in 2024, before declining to 39.8% in 2025 following economic rebasing.
Chief Blakey Okwudili Ijezie, convener of the conference, framed borrowing as an intergenerational compact. "Nations are not judged by the ease of their choices. They are judged by the wisdom of their stewardship," he said. He posed what he called history's eventual question: "Not how much did we borrow — but what did we build with what we borrowed?"
Ijezie singled out **tax reform** as the administration's standout achievement. "One of the best decisions President Bola Tinubu made was appointing Taiwo Oyedele to lead the tax reform effort. In my view, tax reform is the administration's most significant achievement." He added, however, that implementation has slowed due to political headwinds.
Banking and finance expert Mr. Emeka Atuma challenged the government's budget arithmetic directly, arguing that Nigeria's fiscal problem is partly one of disclosure. "The real problem is not that we are not taxing enough — it is that we are not disclosing what we are taxing, and we are not implementing what we have already designed," he said.
A consensus emerged across all four guest speakers: borrowing is not inherently wrong, but Nigeria's borrowing has become structurally detached from productive investment. Most domestic borrowings have been directed at financing recurrent budget deficits rather than capital assets capable of generating future revenue — a pattern speakers described as fiscally unsustainable.
Speakers also warned against the growing practice of borrowing to service existing debt. "You are compounding interest. You are extending the burden to the future generation," Dr. Ossai cautioned. The IMF's assessment that 63% of Nigerians now live below the poverty line sharpened the debate around the human cost of the country's fiscal posture.
The conference concluded that the deeper problem is not borrowing itself, but the absence of a transparent, productivity-linked framework connecting every loan to measurable economic returns.
