Nigeria settled $30B in arrears with the Paris Club. $18B was written off; external debt fell from $46B (2004) to $17.5B (2006). Obasanjo's signature fiscal achievement.
2008 to 2009
Global financial crisis
Nigeria weathered the crisis with low debt (about 5% of GDP) and significant FX reserves. Yar'Adua era, minimal new borrowing.
2014
GDP rebasing
Nigeria's GDP nearly doubled overnight after methodology update. Made debt ratios look smaller, but the underlying naira-amount kept climbing.
2016
Oil crash + recession
Oil prices collapsed to $44/barrel. First Nigerian recession in 25 years. Buhari government turned to aggressive external borrowing, Eurobonds, China loans.
2020
COVID-19 fiscal response
Emergency IMF + multilateral borrowing. External debt jumped from $81B (2019) to $88B. Gov debt-to-GDP crossed 25% for the first time since 2002.
2022
The 96% number
Federal government spent about 96% of revenue servicing debt, up from 83.2% in 2021, per the World Bank's Macro Poverty Outlook for Nigeria (April 2023).
2023
Fuel subsidy removal + naira float
Tinubu's first-day policies aimed at fiscal repair. External debt steady at $103B, but the naira's 40%+ devaluation reshaped the local-currency value of dollar debt.
External debt: total stock owed to foreign creditors, World Bank IDS. Debt service: actual payments (principal + interest) made each year. Government debt / GDP: IMF WEO estimate of general government gross debt, includes federal, sub-national, and CBN ways-and-means.
What's missing
The headline "96% of revenue → debt service" comes from the World Bank's Macro Poverty Outlook for Nigeria (April 2023), not from the debt statistics the table is built on, so it has no column of its own. Domestic-vs-external composition by quarter is only in DMO's PDF reports and not yet integrated here.
Limitations
Pre-1999 data comes from the late military era and may be revised. The 2014 GDP rebase makes pre-2014 debt-to-GDP ratios appear higher than they would under current methodology. All USD figures are nominal (current-year prices), not inflation-adjusted.
