New: Nigeria Serviced Debt With 96% Of Its Revenue In 2022 – World Bank

The World Bank has made a new revelation on Nigeria’s debt.

It revealed that Nigeria used 96.3 per cent of its revenue generated in 2022 to service debt, saying that the constant fiscal deficit has aggravated the nation’s public debt stock.

This was according to the Macro Poverty Outlook for Nigeria: April 2023 brief released by the bank.

The report read in part, “The fiscal position deteriorated. In 2022, the cost of the petrol subsidy increased from 0.7 per cent to 2.3 per cent GDP. Low non-oil revenues and high-interest payments compounded fiscal pressures.

“The fiscal deficit was estimated at 5.0 per cent of GDP in 2022, breaching the stipulated limit for a federal fiscal deficit of 3 per cent. This has kept the public debt stock at over 38 per cent of GDP and pushed the debt service to revenue ratio from 83.2 per cent in 2021 to 96.3 per cent in 2022.”

The bank also said that the cash scarcity created by the Central Bank of Nigeria’s naira redesign policy hindered the country’s economic growth and poverty reduction efforts, adding that about 13 million Nigerians would become poor between 2019 and 2025.

It said, “Nigeria is in a more fragile position than before the late 2021 global oil price boom. Growth and poverty reduction have further been affected by cash scarcity in the context of the Naira redesign.