Nigeria’s private sector foreign debt surged by 179.6 percent over a seven-year period, reaching $54.48 billion in 2025 from $19.49 billion in 2018, according to a new report by the World Bank. The data indicates that Nigerian businesses now owe foreign lenders nearly three times the amount they owed in 2018.
Breakdown of External Debt
The World Bank disclosed these figures in its International Debt Report 2026, which states that Nigeria’s private sector nonguaranteed external debt stood at $54.476 billion as of December 2025. The report defines this category as money borrowed by private companies from foreign banks, investors, and other lenders without any government or public institution guaranteeing repayment. In contrast, public and publicly guaranteed external debt includes long-term obligations of public debtors, such as the central government and state-owned enterprises, while short-term debt is defined as obligations with an original maturity of one year or less.
The growth in private sector debt outpaced the increase in government-backed external debt, which rose by 155.5 percent from $24.422 billion in 2018 to $62.4 billion in 2025. Consequently, private companies’ foreign debt has become a more significant component of Nigeria’s overall external debt burden. In 2018, private sector nonguaranteed debt was equivalent to approximately 79.8 percent of public and publicly guaranteed external debt; by 2025, this ratio had increased to 87.3 percent.
Nigeria’s total external debt, which encompasses government borrowing, private companies’ foreign loans, and short-term obligations, increased from $46.238 billion in 2018 to $145.015 billion in 2025. The report highlights that the cost of borrowing from private foreign lenders is significantly higher than that of official creditors.
According to the World Bank, new loans obtained by Nigeria from private foreign creditors in 2025 carried an average interest rate of 9.6 percent. This is substantially higher than the 1.9 percent average interest rate for loans from official creditors, such as governments and multilateral institutions. Additionally, private lenders offered an average repayment period of 12 years, compared with 25 years for official creditors.
<small>Source: Vanguard News — read the original story there.</small>
