By Atoyebi Nike
Civic-tech advocacy group Citizen Monitors has called on the Federal Government to make its borrowing records fully accessible to the public, as Nigeria’s total public debt climbs to ₦149.39 trillion ($97.24 billion).
The appeal, issued in a statement on Monday by co-founder Adeshope Haastrup, comes shortly after the Senate approved a new $21 billion external borrowing plan.
“Debt isn’t the enemy; opacity is,” Haastrup said in the statement titled Unchecked Borrowings: Citizen Monitors Demands Transparency. “If loans are truly for classrooms, clinics, power, and jobs, then publish the term sheets, publish the project milestones, and let citizens see the outputs, month by month.”
According to the Debt Management Office, nearly half of Nigeria’s total debt as of March 2025 is denominated in foreign currency. Citizen Monitors warned that without transparency, loan repayments would eventually lead to service cuts, higher taxes, or currency depreciation.
The group proposed six steps to make debt spending visible: publishing non-confidential loan agreements and project annexes, providing quarterly, machine-readable debt data, capping non-concessional foreign borrowing, creating public dashboards with community-led project verification, disclosing commodity-backed loan deals, and enforcing open contracting with independent monitoring.
“Give the public data, and we’ll provide the dashboard,” said Olajumoke Alawode-James, Head of Communications. “Every kilometer of road, every classroom, and every megawatt built with borrowed funds should be visible and verifiable.”
Citizen Monitors cited recent borrowing as evidence of urgency, including $2.25 billion from the World Bank in June 2024 for macroeconomic reforms, $1.08 billion in April 2025 for education and resilience projects, $254.76 million from the China Development Bank for the Kano-Kaduna rail, and China Exim Bank financing for road projects.
“Publish it, track it, and show it. That’s how you turn debt from a burden into a tool for national progress,” Haastrup concluded.
