A national tax and economic conference in Lagos has delivered a sobering verdict on Nigeria’s fiscal direction, with analysts warning that the country’s debt accumulation has become structurally detached from productive investment.
The 17th Blakey’s National Tax & Economic Conference, convened under the theme “The Master’s Borrowings in Nigeria,” brought together finance professionals, academics, and policy observers to dissect a public debt profile that has drawn alarm from both analysts and ordinary Nigerians.
Dr. Patrick Ossai, drawing on data from the Central Bank of Nigeria, the National Bureau of Statistics, and the Debt Management Office, presented a fiscal arc that he described as frightening in both scale and speed. Public debt stood at roughly N87.38 trillion when the current administration 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 end-2026 if present trends continue.
The 2026 budget, signed at N68.32 trillion, carries a deficit of N23.85 trillion. Domestic treasury bill issuance to cover budget shortfalls has run at N9.62 trillion in 2023, N7.8 trillion in 2024, and N8.5 trillion in 2025, with N10.07 trillion pencilled for 2026.
Conference convener and retired chartered accountant Chief Blakey Okwudili Ijezie framed borrowing as an intergenerational ethical question. “Nations are not judged by the ease of their choices. They are judged by the wisdom of their stewardship,” he said, adding that every loan contracted in Nigeria’s name is ultimately contracted in the name of Nigerians yet unborn.
Ijezie singled out the tax reform effort led by Taiwo Oyedele as the administration’s most significant achievement, though he noted that implementation has slowed due to political headwinds.
Banking and finance expert Mr. Emeka Atuma challenged the government’s budget logic directly. “When you do your budgets, you estimate how much you are going to earn, you estimate what you want to spend — the difference is what you should borrow. Not the two together,” he argued. He questioned how the 2026 budget reached N68.32 trillion without a credible financing plan and said the core fiscal weakness is not inadequate taxation but poor disclosure and weak implementation of existing revenue designs.
Other panellists broadened the inquiry. Pastor Felix Jarikre examined how decades of easy oil revenue eroded national fiscal discipline, while Mrs. Gloria Okwuosa explored the social and human development costs of a posture that consistently privileges creditor confidence over citizen welfare.
The conference heard that the debt-service-to-revenue ratio, which peaked at 97 percent in 2023 — meaning N97 of every N100 earned went to debt repayment — has since eased to roughly 48 to 49 percent in 2025, helped partly by GDP rebasing. The debt-to-GDP ratio rose from 29.4 percent in 2023 to 42.5 percent in 2024, before moderating to 39.8 percent in 2025 following the rebasing exercise.
External facilities have also grown, with World Bank financing of approximately $8.75 billion across 14 projects in power, health, education, and social intervention, alongside multilateral loans estimated at $10 billion for infrastructure and budget support.
Yet speakers noted that the bulk of domestic borrowing has funded recurrent deficits rather than capital assets capable of generating future revenue. The N22.7 trillion in Ways and Means advances inherited from the previous administration was securitised into a roughly 40-year instrument, restructuring a legacy liability without extinguishing it.
A broader consensus at the conference held that borrowing is not inherently wrong. The deeper deficit, participants concluded, is the absence of a transparent framework that ties every loan to measurable economic returns — a gap that, left unaddressed, will compound the burden on generations with no say in today’s fiscal choices.
