Civic-tech platform Citizen Monitors on Monday demanded that the Federal Government open its loan books to public scrutiny as Nigeria’s public debt hit ₦149.39 trillion ($97.24 billion).
Amid that, the Senate recently approved a new $21 billion external borrowing plan.
“Debt isn’t the enemy, opacity is,” said , Co-founder of Citizen Monitors, Adeshope Haastrup, in a statement made available to PUNCH Online on Monday, titled, “Unchecked Borrowings: Citizen Monitors Demands Transparency.”
“If loans are truly for classrooms, clinics, power and jobs, then publish the term sheets, publish the project milestones, and let citizens see the outputs, month by month,” he stated.
The Debt Management Office said nearly half of the country’s total debt at the end of March 2025 was denominated in foreign currency.
Citizen Monitors warned that without transparency, repayments will eventually show up as “cuts in services, higher taxes, or currency weakness.”
The group outlined six measures to make debt spending visible, including “publishing non-confidential loan terms and project annexes, providing quarterly machine-readable debt data, capping non-concessional foreign borrowing, creating public project dashboards with community verification, disclosing commodity-backed deals, and enforcing open contracting with independent monitors.”
“Give the public data, and we’ll provide the dashboard,” said Olajumoke Alawode-James, Head of Communications.
“Every kilometre of road, every classroom, every megawatt built with borrowed funds should be visible and verifiable.”
Citizen Monitors pointed to recent loan approvals as evidence of urgency: $2.25 billion from the World Bank in June 2024 for macroeconomic reforms, $1.08 billion in April 2025 for education, nutrition and resilience, $254.76 million from China Development Bank for the Kano–Kaduna rail, and China Exim-backed financing for roads.
“Publish it, track it, show it.
“That’s how you turn debt from a burden into a tool for national progress,” Haastrup concluded.
