There is a question Nigerian voters are rarely invited to ask, because it is unglamorous and because almost no politician benefits from the answer: what exactly did the country buy with all the money it borrowed? Every administration since the return to democracy has borrowed. Every one of them announced the loans as investment. And yet the roads are still bad, the power supply is still erratic, and the hospitals are still emptying out. Somewhere between the loan agreement and the lived reality, the money stopped becoming anything. Peter Obi has built a large part of his political identity on refusing to let that question go unasked, and it may be the most consequential thing about his candidacy.
A Country That Borrows for Today
Obi’s central argument on debt is deceptively simple: it is not a sin to borrow, but it is close to a crime to borrow for consumption. A loan taken to build a rail line, a port, a transmission network or an irrigation scheme pays for itself, because the asset it creates generates the revenue that retires the debt. A loan taken to fund recurrent expenditure — salaries, allowances, travel, the running costs of an oversized political class — creates nothing. It simply moves today’s comfort onto tomorrow’s balance sheet. Nigeria has done far too much of the second kind, and Obi has been unusually willing to say so plainly, in language that does not require an economics degree to follow.
When Debt Service Becomes the Budget
The consequence of decades of consumption borrowing is now visible in the arithmetic of every federal budget. For years, the share of federal revenue swallowed by debt servicing has been reported at levels that would alarm any finance ministry in the world — in some periods approaching, and by some measures exceeding, the whole of what the government actually collected. When a country reaches that point, its budget stops being a statement of priorities and becomes a repayment schedule with a few social programmes attached to the edges. Ministries are not underfunded because Nigerians do not need schools or clinics. They are underfunded because the money was committed years ago, by people who will never be asked to account for it.
The Anambra Habit
What gives Obi’s position weight is that he practised a version of it before he ever preached it nationally. His eight years in Anambra are best remembered for what he did not do with money: he did not spend everything the state received, he did not leave behind a wall of unpaid contractor certificates, and he left office publicly accounting for savings and investments rather than a pile of obligations. Reasonable people have argued about the precise figures, and they should. But the shape of the record is not seriously in dispute, and it is a rare shape in Nigerian politics. A governor who hands over more than he inherited is a governor who understood that public money belongs to the next administration too.
Frugality Is Not the Same as Austerity
Obi’s critics sometimes accuse him of confusing thrift with governance, as though counting money were a substitute for building things. It is a misreading. His argument is not that Nigeria should spend less; it is that Nigeria should spend differently. He has consistently proposed cutting the cost of running the government — the convoys, the duplicated agencies, the aircraft, the sprawling delegations — precisely so that more can be spent on the things that compound: power generation, farm inputs, teacher salaries, primary health centres, credit for small manufacturers. Austerity asks citizens to endure less. What Obi describes asks the political class to endure less so that citizens can have more. Those are opposite propositions, and Nigerians have grown very familiar with the wrong one.
Show the Country the Terms
There is a transparency dimension to this that deserves more attention than it gets. Nigerians are rarely told, in any accessible form, what a new loan is for, what it costs, what it is secured against, and what milestone it is meant to deliver. Loans are announced as headlines and then disappear into a fog of procurement. A government serious about restoring public trust would publish the project, the price, the timeline and the repayment profile of every facility it signs, and let citizens and journalists check the promised bridge against the actual bridge. Obi’s insistence on data and documentation in public life points naturally in that direction — and a leader who has spent a career quoting figures at people is a leader who can be held to his own.
The Generation That Will Pay
Debt is the one policy area where the people most affected have no vote. The graduates now leaving Nigerian universities did not sign the agreements that will consume a large share of federal revenue through their working lives, and the children in primary school today will still be paying when the men who borrowed the money are long out of public life. This is why the debt conversation belongs at the centre of the 2027 campaign rather than in the footnotes. It is not an accounting dispute. It is a question about whether one generation is entitled to spend the earnings of the next, and to do it without ever showing a receipt.
A Promise That Can Be Checked
Nigerians have heard a great many promises they had no means of verifying. The virtue of Obi’s position on borrowing is that it is testable. Publish the loans. Tie them to assets. Cut the cost of governance first. Report the debt-service ratio the way a company reports earnings. Any president who committed to that could be measured against it within a single budget cycle, and every citizen with a calculator could do the measuring. In a political culture that has learned to speak in the language of vision statements and grand corridors, a candidate offering something as unromantic as arithmetic is offering something rarer than vision. He is offering accountability, in a form that cannot be quietly abandoned.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
