Unuevbo TV
"If You Must Know, We Are Borrowing to Finance Infrastructure, Not Consumption": Presidency Fires Back as Peter Obi Labels Nigeria's Debt "Leprosy and Killer Cancer" in Heated Exchange
It began, as so many of Nigeria's most consequential political clashes now do, with a single presidential utterance — a remark that was part metaphor, part manifesto, and entirely combustible. Standing before an audience earlier this week, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu defended his administration's borrowing profile with a line that was destined to travel: "Borrowing is not leprosy; we just have to work hard to be able to pay back." By Wednesday, 30 April 2026, that line had reached Peter Obi, the former Anambra State governor, 2023 Labour Party presidential candidate, and now African Democratic Congress (ADC) aspirant, who responded not with a rebuttal but with a diagnosis — and the diagnosis was terminal. "Mr President, borrowing is not only leprosy, but a killer cancer when it is borrowed for consumption and not production as it is in Nigeria today," Obi wrote in a post on X that would, within hours, draw a scathing retort from Presidential Spokesman Bayo Onanuga, ignite a national debate over Nigeria's N159.28 trillion debt stock, and expose the fault line that will define the economic dimension of the 2027 election campaign: is Nigeria borrowing to build, or borrowing to survive?
The exchange, which played out across X, traditional media headlines, and the WhatsApp groups that have become the digital amplifiers of Nigeria's political discourse, was not merely a clash of personalities — though the personalities, a president and his most persistent critic, provided the electricity. It was a collision of two irreconcilable narratives about what has happened to Nigeria's debt profile over the past three years, what it means for the country's economic future, and whether the administration's defence of its borrowing — that it is "deliberate, strategic and tied to infrastructure development" — can survive contact with the lived experience of Nigerians who have seen debt service consume an ever-larger share of government revenue while the tangible benefits of infrastructure investment remain, for millions, stubbornly invisible. "The fact that we are receiving funds and have willing lenders shows that our country is credible and capable of repaying," Onanuga declared, framing access to credit markets as a mark of economic credibility rather than evidence of distress. Obi's retort — that "having one of the world's highest debt servicing ratios" was the real indicator of fiscal health, not the willingness of lenders to extend credit — cut to the heart of the disagreement. Both men were looking at the same numbers. They were simply drawing opposite conclusions from them.
Obi's Indictment: "Most of the Borrowings Do Not Satisfy the Requirements of Law or Economic Common Sense"
To understand why Obi's intervention resonated beyond the usual partisan echo chambers, one must examine the architecture of his argument — which was not, at its core, about the morality of borrowing, but about its legality and economic logic. The former Anambra governor did not condemn all debt as self-evidently destructive; he condemned a specific kind of debt: the kind that is "not tied to measurable economic value," that "does not translate into jobs, growth, or improved living standards for the Nigerian people," and that fails to satisfy the requirements of the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007. The Act, which Obi cited as the legal benchmark against which all government borrowing should be measured, stipulates that "any government in the Federation or its agencies and corporations desirous of borrowing shall specify the purpose for which the borrowing is intended and present a cost-benefit analysis, detailing the economic and social benefits of the purpose to which the intended borrowing is to be applied."
In Obi's telling, the administration's borrowing fails both the legal test and the test of common sense. "Most of the borrowings by this government do not satisfy the requirements of law or the requirements of economic common sense," he stated. "The humongous borrowing so far does not show how the projects for the loans enhance the productive capacity of the nation and the welfare of Nigerian citizens."It was a claim that, by its very specificity, demanded a rebuttal that went beyond Onanuga's assertion that "this administration has been borrowing to finance much-needed infrastructure, not consumption."What infrastructure, precisely? What cost-benefit analyses were conducted? What measurable improvements in economic growth, job creation, or human welfare can be directly attributed to the N159.28 trillion in accumulated debt? These were the questions embedded in Obi's critique, and they remain, as of this writing, unanswered.
The policy substance of Obi's argument extended further, into a distinction that economists have been making for years but that has rarely featured so prominently in Nigerian political discourse: the difference between debt-to-GDP ratio and debt service-to-revenue ratio as measures of fiscal health. "What matters is not debt-to-GDP as much as debt-servicing ratio because the latter constrains our capacity to finance the sectors that drive human development and economic growth," Obi argued. "These loans are also dangerous because they burden the capacity of the Nigerian state to improve the economy in the future, as we have one of the world's highest debt servicing ratios."The claim is supported by the data. The World Bank, in its latest Nigeria Development Update, warned that heavy debt servicing is weakening Nigeria's ability to invest in infrastructure and human capital, noting that capital spending fell from 1.3 per cent of GDP in 2024 to 1.0 per cent in 2025, and that only 24 per cent of the prorated 2025 capital budget of ministries, departments and agencies was implemented.The debt service-to-revenue ratio — estimated by multiple analysts to exceed 90 per cent — means that for every N100 the government earns, more than N90 goes toward servicing existing debt. That is not a statistic; it is a structural constraint on every other function of the state — from education to healthcare to security.
The Numbers: N159 Trillion and Rising — What the Debt Data Actually Shows
The backdrop to the Obi-Tinubu exchange is a set of fiscal data that has been accumulating with the quiet relentlessness of a gathering storm. On 15 April 2026, the Debt Management Office (DMO) released its latest figures: Nigeria's total public debt stood at N159.28 trillion as of December 2025, up from N144.67 trillion at the end of 2024 — a 10.1 per cent year-on-year increase. Domestic debt accounted for N84.85 trillion, while external debt totalled N74.43 trillion.The federal government alone carried N80.49 trillion in domestic debt and N66.27 trillion in external obligations.The IMF projects Nigeria's debt-to-GDP ratio at 32.3 per cent for 2026, down from 35.5 per cent in 2025 — technically below the 60 per cent global threshold, but as Obi and multiple independent economists have noted, the debt-to-GDP ratio is a misleading metric when a country's revenue base is as narrow as Nigeria's.
More troubling than the aggregate figures is the pace and pattern of new borrowing. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, the federal government borrowed N8.1 trillion domestically, exceeding the quarterly benchmark set under the 2026 budget and representing a 7.4 per cent increase from the N7.5 trillion recorded in the same period of 2025. "Government revenue continues to fall short of expectations. When actual receipts miss targets by a wide margin, borrowing becomes the default tool to keep the lights on and meet recurrent obligations," said Ifeanyi Ubah, chief investment officer of VNL Capital Asset Management Company. David Adonri, chief executive of HighCap Securities, warned that excessive domestic borrowing could crowd out private sector investment and fuel inflation: "The huge deficit in the 2026 budget necessitates borrowing. For the government to overshoot its borrowing limit in Q1 may indicate revenue shortfalls or a deliberate decision to overtrade."The Senate also recently approved a fresh $516 million external loan request, bringing the total new borrowing approved in 2026 to approximately $2.8 billion.
The composition of Nigeria's debt is also instructive. The World Bank remains the country's largest single external creditor, holding $18.3 billion in outstanding loans, making Nigeria the third-largest debtor to the International Development Association (IDA). China's Export-Import Bank is the dominant bilateral creditor, holding $4.91 billion, representing over 80 per cent of bilateral debt. On the domestic side, FGN Bonds account for roughly 80 per cent of domestic debt, held by local banks, pension funds, and institutional investors — a structure that, while insulating Nigeria from some forms of external vulnerability, creates its own risks, including the crowding-out of private-sector credit and the concentration of sovereign risk within the domestic financial system.What this picture reveals is that the debate over whether borrowing is leprosy, cancer, or a necessary tool of development is not merely rhetorical — it is being contested against a backdrop of hard numbers that show a nation whose debt trajectory is accelerating even as its revenue base remains dangerously narrow.
Onanuga's Rebuttal: "Every Sovereign Nation Borrows, and We Are Borrowing to Build"
If Obi's post was a legal brief disguised as a tweet, Onanuga's response was a political advertisement disguised as a policy defence. "Mr Peter Obi, you have come again with your demagoguery. What point are you trying to make about borrowing? Every sovereign nation borrows, and as President Tinubu rightly said, borrowing is not leprosy," the presidential spokesman wrote on X hours after Obi's post had begun trending. "If you must know, this administration has been borrowing to finance much-needed infrastructure, not consumption. The fact that we are receiving funds and have willing lenders shows that our country is credible and capable of repaying. As a politician, you need to rise above the pedestrian level and address issues of the day with rational argument, not emotional reactions on the streets and Twittersphere."The tone — dismissive, patronising, and unmistakably combative — was consistent with Onanuga's established role as the administration's attack dog, a function he has performed with increasing frequency as the 2027 election cycle intensifies.
Yet the substance of Onanuga's defence wilted under even cursory scrutiny. The assertion that "every sovereign nation borrows" — while factually true in the narrow sense that nearly all countries carry some level of debt — elides the critical distinction between borrowing for productive investment that generates returns sufficient to service the debt and borrowing to meet recurrent obligations in the absence of adequate revenue. Japan, for instance, carries a debt-to-GDP ratio exceeding 250 per cent, but its debt is overwhelmingly held domestically, denominated in its own currency, and serviced from a broad tax base. Nigeria's debt, by contrast, is denominated across multiple currencies, carries significantly higher interest rates, and is serviced from a revenue-to-GDP ratio of approximately 9 per cent — one of the lowest in the world. To invoke "every sovereign nation" without acknowledging these distinctions is not an argument; it is a rhetorical sleight of hand designed to make Nigeria's debt profile appear normal when, by the measure that matters most — the proportion of government revenue consumed by debt service — it is anything but.
Onanuga's claim that "having willing lenders shows that our country is credible" also warrants examination. Countries in fiscal distress do not lose access to credit markets overnight; they lose it gradually, as risk premiums rise, maturities shorten, and the composition of debt shifts from concessional multilateral lending to more expensive commercial borrowing. The fact that lenders are still willing to extend credit to Nigeria at a particular moment in time is not evidence of fiscal health — it is evidence that lenders believe they can extract a return that compensates them for the risk they perceive. The DMO's own data shows that yields on Nigerian government bonds have risen steadily in recent months, with the agency forced to offer higher rates to attract sufficient demand — a development that is more consistent with increasing risk perception than with any improvement in Nigeria's creditworthiness.
The Political Calculus: Why This Argument Matters for 2027
The Obi-Presidency clash over debt is not an isolated policy disagreement; it is a preview of the economic debate that will define the 2027 presidential election. Tinubu's re-election campaign is premised on the argument that his administration's reforms — fuel subsidy removal, exchange rate unification, tax restructuring — represent difficult but necessary medicine that will, in time, deliver prosperity. The counter-argument, which Obi has now articulated in terms that are both legally grounded and rhetorically potent, is that the medicine is being administered while the patient continues to haemorrhage — that borrowing without productivity, reform without tangible improvement in living standards, and debt service that starves the state of resources for investment are not a recovery programme but a spiral.
Obi's specific framing — that "a responsible government does not merely defend borrowing; it explains it, justifies it, and most importantly, ensures it works for the people"— is designed to do more than win a policy argument. It is designed to establish a standard against which the administration's fiscal record can be measured, and to position Obi, should he secure the ADC presidential ticket, as the candidate of fiscal accountability. Whether that positioning succeeds will depend on factors far beyond the reach of any tweet: the trajectory of inflation, the performance of the naira, the fate of the 2026 budget's capital expenditure projections, and — perhaps most critically — whether the infrastructure projects that Onanuga insists the borrowing is financing become visible to the Nigerians whose votes will decide the contest. The Presidency has made its case: "Every sovereign nation borrows." Obi has made his: "Borrowing without productivity is leprosy and cancer." The argument is joined. The verdict, as always, belongs to the people — and the election that will deliver it is now barely eight months away.
A Debt Debate That Defines the Coming Contest
The exchange between Peter Obi and the Presidency on 30 April 2026 was about far more than a single line about leprosy and cancer. It was about the fundamental economic question that will shape the 2027 election: has the Tinubu administration's borrowing — N159.28 trillion and counting — been deployed in ways that enhance Nigeria's productive capacity and improve the welfare of its citizens, or has it been consumed by recurrent obligations, debt service, and projects whose economic returns remain, at best, unproven? The Presidency insists the borrowing is strategic and infrastructure-focused. Obi insists it fails the tests of both law and economic common sense. The data — rising debt, declining capital expenditure as a share of GDP, and a debt service burden that consumes over 90 per cent of government revenue — provides ammunition for both sides while resolving the argument for neither. What is beyond dispute is that this argument has now been joined — and it will not be settled on X, in press releases, or even in the fiscal analyses of think tanks and multilateral institutions. It will be settled at the ballot box in January 2027. The campaign has, in every sense that matters, already begun.
Stay tuned to Unuevbo TV for continuing coverage of Nigeria's fiscal policy debates and the 2027 presidential contest.
© 2026 Unuevbo TV – All rights reserved. Republication only with permission.