Some claims about the country’s debt are dishonest, contends JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA
The opposition cannot afford to trust in disinformation as a way to upend the political dynamics. The times have changed and assertions are more easily verifiable than they have ever been. This election must be about ideas, the advancement of sound policies and an appeal to the Nigeria people that doesn’t advance falsehood. Two claims about Nigeria’s debt circulated this week. Both are false. That nobody checked them before sharing tells you what the next nine weeks are going to be.
The first comes from Peter Obi, who asked the President to account for “the over 100 billion dollars you have borrowed.”
Nigeria’s entire public debt, accumulated by every government since 1960, is 120.93 billion dollars. That is the Debt Management Office figure as at 30 June 2026. Sixty-six years of borrowing, by every administration this country has had, military and civilian, comes to 120.93 billion dollars.
So the claim is that one administration, in three years, borrowed roughly five sixths of everything Nigeria has ever owed.
The actual figures are published quarterly. In June 2023, the month this government took office, total public debt stood at 113.4 billion dollars. In June 2026 it is 120.93 billion. The increase, measured in the currency the debt is actually denominated in, is 7.5 billion dollars over three years.
Let’s do the arithmetic.
One hundred billion dollars over three years is 33.3 billion dollars a year. Nigeria is rated single B by Standard and Poor’s, which is six notches below investment grade. Our largest Eurobond in history was 2.35 billion dollars, priced last November, and that issuance was treated as a national achievement precisely because it attracted a record 13 billion dollar order book. Our entire Eurobond portfolio, built up over years, is roughly 15 billion dollars.
For the claim to be true, Nigeria would have raised fourteen times its largest ever issuance, every year, for three consecutive years, without a single bank, rating agency, newspaper or multilateral institution noticing.
There is no market on earth that lends a single-B sovereign 33 billion dollars a year. The claim is not merely wrong. It is arithmetically impossible, and anybody with passing familiarity with sovereign debt would know that before typing it. It is shocking that a mainstream presidential candidate posted such a claim.
The second claim traveled as a graphic. Sixteen Nigerian leaders borrowed 46 trillion naira in 63 years, it announces, while Tinubu borrowed 120 trillion in three.
Forty-six trillion naira is not what sixteen leaders borrowed. It is the outstanding debt stock on a single date, 31 December 2022. Presenting a stock as though it were a flow is the oldest trick in political arithmetic, and it works because most people do not know there is a difference.
That 46 trillion also excluded 22.7 trillion naira in Ways and Means advances, money the Federal Government had already spent through the Central Bank, which the National Assembly securitised into formal debt in May 2023. The figure was understated by nearly half before anybody signed anything.
Total public debt was 87.38 trillion naira in June 2023. It is 166.79 trillion today. That is an increase of 79 trillion, not 120.
And roughly 43 trillion of that increase is not borrowing at all. It is the naira moving from about 460 to the dollar to 1,379. The Debt Management Office converts external debt into naira at the official rate on the reporting date. When the rate triples, the naira value of a dollar obligation triples, without one additional dollar being borrowed. Same debt. Three times the number.
Then there is the subsidy question, raised in the same breath. What has been done with the 15.8 trillion naira saved from fuel subsidy removal.
It was published in August. The Minister of Finance set it out in public, with a breakdown. Of the 15.8 trillion that accrued to the Federation between June 2023 and December 2025, 5.43 trillion went to the Federal Government, 6.52 trillion to the states and 3.88 trillion to local governments. Two thirds of it in essence went to the subnational governments.
Monthly distributions to states and councils through the Federation Account rose from 656 billion naira in April 2023 to 2.4 trillion by September 2026.
So the question is a fair one. It is simply addressed to the wrong person. The money went down, to thirty-six governors and seven hundred and seventy-four council chairmen, and the accounting for most of it belongs with them.
None of this means Nigeria’s debt position is comfortable. It is not. The International Monetary Fund puts debt service at 53.7 per cent of federal revenue. More than half of what this country earns is committed before a single classroom is built or a single road is laid. That is a serious argument, it is supported by evidence, and it deserves to be had in public.
But that argument is not available to anybody who has just claimed a hundred billion dollars. You cannot demand fiscal seriousness while being fiscally unserious. The honest critique of Nigerian debt concerns the cost of carrying it, not the size of a number produced by multiplying an old one by three.
Every one of these claims was checkable in minutes against sources the government itself publishes. They circulated anyway, because the people sharing them were not trying to establish whether they were true. Anything to make the country look bad will make the government look bad and that in turn affects how people will vote. That’s the thinking.
But notice what the lie concedes. Nobody invents a hundred billion dollars when the real number will do the job. The fabrication is a confession that the truth was not enough.
A true argument was available. The International Monetary Fund puts debt service at 53.7 per cent of federal revenue. That argument cannot now be had, because it is buried beneath the big lie of 100 billion dollars that never was. Campaigning began in August. Nine weeks remain. Still plenty time to focus the conversation on what truly counts and can be counted.
Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing