President Bola Tinubu told the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi this week that Nigeria will spend approximately $11.6 billion servicing debt obligations in 2026 — more than double the $5.2 billion serviced in 2025, and a figure that consumes nearly half the country’s projected revenue.
The number reframes everything else the Tinubu administration is trying to do.
Fuel subsidy removal. Exchange rate unification. Bank recapitalisation. Tax reform. Each of those was sold to Nigerians as a difficult adjustment that would pay off through restored fiscal space and renewed investor confidence. The reforms have, by the Finance Ministry’s own metrics, started to work: foreign reserves are up, the projected debt-to-GDP ratio sits at 32.3 percent. But the debt-service line item is going in the opposite direction — and it is going there fast.
Tinubu’s argument in Nairobi was that this is not a Nigerian problem. It is the structure of the global financial system penalising African economies through high borrowing costs, restricted access to concessional financing, and credit ratings disconnected from on-the-ground economic reality. “Every dollar spent on punitive interest payments,” he told the summit, “is money that cannot go into manufacturing, infrastructure, agriculture, energy or technology.”
He is correct on the diagnosis. Whether the diagnosis converts into reform is a different question. The IMF, the World Bank, and the major credit rating agencies are not in the habit of being moved by speeches at African summits. The leverage that does sometimes work — coordinated regional positions, AU-level mandates, voting blocs at the multilateral development banks — requires a unity that has been hard to assemble. Tinubu’s delegation to Nairobi included Aliko Dangote, Tony Elumelu, Abdulsamad Rabiu, and Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, an unusual concentration of Nigerian private-sector heft in one foreign capital. The signal was deliberate: this is the kind of African private capital the continent already has, and which is structurally being asked to subsidise foreign lenders rather than build the economies that produced it.
In the margins, Tinubu confirmed Nigeria’s bid to host the 2026 CAF Awards and the 48th Ordinary General Assembly of African football’s governing body in October. He met separately with Madagascar’s President Michael Randrianirina and CAF President Patrice Motsepe. Whatever the substantive outcomes of the summit, Nigeria spent the week in Nairobi looking like a country that intends to be one of the continent’s anchor players in the next decade rather than a country in fiscal retreat.
Also today: Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde is expected to formally declare his presidential ambition at a major rally at Mapo Hall in Ibadan, opening the 2027 PDP race in earnest. The Federal High Court in Abuja continues the trial-within-trial of six persons accused of plotting to overthrow the Tinubu government. JAMB has released additional UTME 2026 results, with total candidate count nearing 1.9 million.
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