Adedapo Adesanya
By Adedapo Adesanya
Nigeria has repaid a total of $12.56 billion in external debt as of 2022, data from Intelpoint showed.
According to the latest debt figures, Nigeria’s total public debt rose by 75.3 per cent to N87.38 trillion at the end of the second quarter of 2023 against N49.85 trillion recorded in the first quarter of the year.
The rise came as the country securitised the N22.71 trillion Ways and Means Advances of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to the federal government. The overdraft is a loan facility through which the CBN finances the shortfalls in the government’s budget. This also happened as the country liberalised the exchange rate in mid-June, a move that saw the Naira drop by over 40 per cent.
Nigeria has a total domestic debt of N54.13 trillion and a total external debt of N33.25 trillion, with the domestic debt making up 61.95 per cent of total debt while the remaining 38.05 per cent was for external.
According to the Intelpoint data, which looked at debt repayments from 2008 through 2022, Nigeria repaid an average of $368 million in external debt every year between 2008 and 2017.
In 2018, the payments increased by 217 per cent to $1.47 billion from $464 million in 2017, then dropped by 9.4 per cent to $1.33 billion in 2019, and has since been on the rise.
In 2020, a coronavirus pandemic ravaged year, the country recorded a debt repayment of $1.56 billion. This rose by 26.1 per cent to $2.11 billion in 2021 and notched higher by 14.2 per cent in 2022.
While the country continues to repay its debt amid a worsening FX crisis, the current administration of President Bola Tinubu has indicated interest in not borrowing in the meantime, halting a trend that was rampant under his predecessor, Mr Muhammadu Buhari.
“The federal government is not in a position to borrow at this time. Rather, the emphasis has to be on creating a stable macroeconomic environment. Stable inflation, stable exchange rate, an environment within which people can come and invest and thereby increase production and further grow the economy. Improve and create jobs and reduce poverty,” Mr Wale Edun, the Minister of Finance, said in August.
