Nigeria's debt payments significantly outweigh health and education spending, ActionAid report finds

The report, titled “Still Cooking with a Failed Recipe: A Review of IMF Country Advice on Social Spending, Public Services, Debt, Tax and Gender Equality,” examined 29 International Monetary Fund IMF documents across 11 countries, including Nigeria, between February 2022 and February 2025. Nigeria spends 20.1 percent of its national revenue on external debt payments, compared to 4.06 percent on health and 4.40 percent on education. The report criticizes the IMF for pushing policies that have undermined social spending and worsened economic hardship, noting that the IMF did not connect debt servicing with its implications for health and education funding.

It also highlights that the IMF recommended Nigeria remove its fuel subsidy, acknowledging that compensatory measures for the poor were inadequate, leading to the reintroduction of a subsidy. Furthermore, the report alleges that IMF policy advice to Nigeria remains largely unchanged despite public commitments to social spending and gender equality, and that Nigeria's public-sector wage bill has been frozen at 1.9 percent of GDP for six years, the lowest among the reviewed countries. ActionAid Nigeria’s Country Director, Andrew Mamedu, criticized the IMF's "double standards," pointing out that the IMF did not recommend