Nigeria will spend $11.6 billion on debt servicing this year, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu said yesterday in Nairobi, Kenya. The amount is half of the projected revenue for this year. He spoke during the Africa Forward Summit held at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre, explaining that the global financial architecture is largely skewed against Africa, leaving the continent at the receiving end of development. A statement by Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, quoted the President as saying that Nigeria would spend about $11.6 billion on debt servicing in 2026, representing nearly half of projected government revenue. “Every single dollar that leaves our treasury to pay punitive interest rates is a dollar that did not go into our steel sector, our textile mills, our agro-processing plants, or our digital industries. “We export raw minerals, crude oil, and agricultural commodities, and we import processed goods at a premium. This pattern is not an accident. “It is the product of a global financial architecture that starves our industries of affordable capital, tolerates massive illicit financial flows, and imposes policy constraints that our competitors themselves never observed when they built their own industrial bases,” he said.

Nation