Bola Tinubu told the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi on Tuesday that Nigeria will spend roughly $11.6 billion servicing its public debt in 2026, nearly half of the federal government's projected revenue for the year. The Nigerian president framed the figure as a structural disadvantage of the global financial architecture rather than a Nigerian-specific problem, and called for an overhaul of the multilateral lending system that has shaped African sovereign borrowing since the 1980s.
The remarks led the Wednesday morning newspapers in Lagos, Abuja and Nairobi after the speech was extensively previewed by his office on Tuesday evening. Debt-servicing costs, Tinubu said in the address, are "crowding out spending on infrastructure, healthcare and education, despite a government tax overhaul aimed at boosting revenues" since 2023.
The numbers are the most consequential the Nigerian presidency has put forward in the current cycle. The $11.6 billion projection is approximately 47 per cent of the federal revenue baseline that Finance Minister Wale Edun presented to the National Assembly in November 2025. It is also the highest debt-service-to-revenue ratio in any sub-Saharan African economy outside Ghana, which restructured its debt in 2024.
Tinubu has in his third year in office presided over the most aggressive economic reform programme in Nigeria's democratic history. The June 2023 abolition of the fuel subsidy, the August 2023 unification of the naira exchange rate, and the 2024-25 tax overhaul together represent the most substantive market liberalisation any Nigerian government has attempted. The reforms have stabilised the headline macro picture — the naira has held a band of N1,500-1,700 against the dollar for six months — at the cost of headline inflation that ran at 33.2 per cent in April.
The Africa Forward Summit, co-hosted by Kenya's William Ruto and France's Emmanuel Macron, drew leaders from more than 30 countries. The communique released at the close of the summit on Tuesday evening called for a "concrete and time-bound" overhaul of the World Bank's lending facilities, an increased allocation of Special Drawing Rights to African economies, and a reform of the credit-rating methodology that summit organisers argue systematically over-prices African sovereign debt.
Tinubu is scheduled to travel from Nairobi to Kigali on Wednesday afternoon to address the 2026 Africa CEO Forum, which opens Thursday morning at the Kigali Convention Centre. The Africa CEO Forum, organised by Jeune Afrique Media Group, is the largest annual gathering of senior African corporate leadership; this year's edition is expected to host approximately 2,000 executives, investors and policymakers.
At home, the political backdrop is uneven. Tinubu's All Progressives Congress party narrowly held the Edo and Anambra governorships in November 2025; the opposition Peoples Democratic Party has begun to coalesce around a single candidate for the January 2027 presidential election. The opposition has campaigned principally on the inflation print, and the headline debt-servicing figure announced in Nairobi is expected to feature in opposition messaging through the rest of the year.