The Federal Government borrowed N12 trillion and gave capital projects only N3.1 trillion of it. The rest went somewhere else. This is not a minor accounting problem or a technical detail for budget experts. This is the mechanism by which Nigeria has chosen not to build.
Capital projects are roads, hospitals, power plants, water systems, schools. They are the physical infrastructure that makes an economy work and creates jobs that last. When a government starves capital spending, it is making a deliberate choice about what kind of country it wants to be. Nigeria has made that choice, and the evidence is in the numbers.
Consider what happened to that N12 trillion. If capital projects received N3.1 trillion, that means N8.9 trillion went to other things. Some went to recurrent spending. Some went to debt servicing. Some went to salaries and wages. Some went to goods and services. None of these are inherently wasteful. Governments need to pay teachers and doctors. But when you borrow money at the scale Nigeria has been borrowing, when you push your debt-to-revenue ratio to dangerous levels, the question becomes acute: what are you borrowing for? If you are borrowing to pay salaries and service old debts, you are not borrowing to invest. You are borrowing to maintain the current system and pay for past mistakes.
The numbers tell a story about priorities. Nigeria's debt service now consumes more than 90 percent of government revenue. That leaves almost nothing for anything else. So when new money comes in through borrowing, it gets pulled immediately into the debt servicing vortex. Very little reaches the ground as actual investment in things that could grow the economy.
This is a trap that has caught other countries before. When debt servicing becomes this large a share of government spending, it crowds out investment. The government cannot borrow its way to growth because all the borrowed money is already spoken for. You end up with a country that looks borrowed-from but not invested-in. Roads crumble. Power plants cannot be built or maintained. Schools lack basic facilities. Meanwhile, the debt keeps growing because the economy is not growing fast enough to service it.
Someone will say that Nigeria had no choice. The argument goes that the pandemic created emergency spending, that insecurity forced the government's hand, that salaries had to be paid. These things are true in parts. But they are not the whole truth. The choice to borrow N12 trillion was a choice. The choice to allocate only 26 percent of it to capital projects was a choice. Other countries facing similar pressures made different choices. Kenya, for all its problems, has maintained capital spending at higher levels. South Africa, facing worse unemployment and a worse fiscal position, has still kept infrastructure investment higher than 30 percent of government borrowing.
What makes this worse is that capital projects are the one thing government borrowing is actually defensible for. Borrowing to build a power plant that will generate revenue for decades, or a road that will facilitate commerce, or a hospital that will serve people for generations, makes economic sense. You are trading future revenue for present capacity. But borrowing to pay salaries and service old debts is just postponing pain. It adds weight without adding capacity.
The government will point to projects that have been completed. Some roads have been built. Some power came online. Some hospitals got rehabilitation funds. But the 26 percent figure shows that whatever has been built happened against the tide of a budget structure that does not prioritize building. The projects that did happen often came late, went over budget, and did not integrate into a coherent national plan.
What should happen now is clear but unlikely to happen. The government needs to commit to a minimum threshold for capital spending in any borrowing program. Something like 40 or 50 percent of new loans must go to capital projects. It should set this rule and stick to it, even when pressures come. It should also begin the harder work of cutting recurrent spending and debt servicing as a share of total expenditure. That means reducing the federal payroll, consolidating agencies, and being honest about what the government can afford to do.
Without this change, Nigeria will continue to be a country where the government borrows but does not build. In five years, the debt will be larger and the infrastructure will still be broken. The next government will face the same constraints, make the same choices, and borrow more. The public will get older and more restless. At some point, the game ends because lenders stop lending, or because the political system breaks.
The number itself, 26 percent, is not really about accounting. It is about the future.
OduViews represents the editorial opinion of OduNews.
