The Debt Management Office has finally put a number on the thing economists have been warning about. In its 2024 Debt Sustainability Analysis, released on Monday, the agency projects that Nigeria’s debt service will absorb 71.7% of government revenue by 2030 under its baseline scenario. The document arrives with a caveat that deserves as much attention as the figure: the 2023 edition was never published.
Start with the path. In the baseline, debt service as a share of revenue stood at 60.6% in 2024 and eased to 44.9% in 2025. Then the line turns. It climbs above the 50% threshold in 2026 and keeps climbing until it reaches 71.7% at the end of the decade. A country that spends close to three-quarters of what it collects on servicing old borrowing has very little left for roads, schools, salaries or anything else that voters can see.
The baseline is the optimistic case, and it rests on assumptions that are not guaranteed. The DMO assumes an exchange rate of ₦1,500 to the dollar, real GDP growth of 4.8% and a primary balance of 3.8%. Hold those and the arithmetic works. Move them and it does not. The agency’s own stress test assumes a 30% currency depreciation, a 2% fall in GDP and a 2.5% cut to revenue. In that world, debt service as a share of revenue reads 57.4% in 2026, 70.9% in 2027, 75.3% in 2028, 89.6% in 2029 and 97.3% in 2030. In other words, a bad run of luck would leave the government with almost nothing after paying its creditors.
The gap between the two cases is the real story. By 2030 the shock scenario is 25.6 percentage points worse than the baseline, and it gets there faster. The shocked path crosses 70% in 2027, three years before the baseline does. The DMO chooses to describe this as sustainability that is “moderate but highly vulnerable.” It is a careful phrase, and it is carrying a lot of weight.
Debt relative to the size of the economy tells a gentler tale. Under the baseline, the ratio falls to 27.3% of GDP by 2030, and to 34.6% in the shock case. That is the argument the government will lean on: the stock of debt is manageable against the economy. But the economy is not what pays the interest. Revenue is, and Nigeria collects very little of it relative to what it owes. This is why a low debt-to-GDP ratio and a punishing debt service burden can sit in the same document without contradicting each other.
The composition of the debt adds a second pressure point. According to the DMO, 49% of the debt is held by non-residents, against a 45% threshold. Foreign holders matter because they are sensitive to the exchange rate, and the exchange rate is the one assumption the baseline needs most. A weaker naira raises the naira cost of every dollar owed and pushes the ratio toward the shock path. The agency’s recommendations follow from that: sustain the removal of the petrol subsidy and keep a unified, flexible foreign exchange regime.
The cost is already visible. In the first half of 2026, Nigeria paid ₦5.28 trillion to service its domestic debt, of which ₦4.95 trillion was interest and rental payments. Interest is the overwhelming part of that bill. Principal is almost an afterthought. The country is largely paying for the privilege of having borrowed, and rolling the rest forward.
Nairametrics put the same trend in terms of what was forgone. Its analysis found ₦10.61 trillion in additional debt service costs between June 2023 and December 2025, about ₦4.14 trillion more than the ₦6.47 trillion spent on strategic infrastructure over the same period. The government borrowed ₦11.9 trillion across that window. Read together, the numbers say that for a stretch, the cost of carrying debt grew faster than the investment it was meant to fund.
More Branches has tracked the same direction of travel. Public debt stood at ₦166.79 trillion at 30 June, up from ₦87.38 trillion in June 2023, and interest was on course to take 53.7% of revenue in 2026, up from 40.8% in 2024. The DMO’s new projections extend that line rather than break it.
None of this means a default is coming. It does mean the margin for error is thin and the next few years will be decided by variables the government does not fully control: the naira, oil, growth and how much more the Treasury collects. The report’s most useful contribution may be its honesty about that. A country can survive a heavy debt service bill if its revenue grows. The question the 71.7% figure leaves is whether anyone has a credible plan for making it grow.
