Business Segment: The Debt Debate in Benue

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:05]Time to get down to some business in a very brief way with Rotus Odiri. Rotus, take it away.

[00:00:11]>> Good morning and goodbye Dr. Rufai.

[00:00:13]Let's jump into it. GDP is just GDP and debts for Benue is what we're going to look at. So, economic growth coming in at 3.89%.

[00:00:20]It slowed from the fourth quarter. This is for Nigeria, of course. 4.07.

[00:00:24]Historically, when you've got the festive season and all that aggregate demand, you do see a slow down from the last 3 months of 1 year going into the first 3 months of the next year. This was a non-oil story and a non-oil story as well. 3.13 prior year. So, you can see non-oil growth 3.94. Agriculture, not bad. And others, manufacturing Q4 2025 was 3.99.

[00:00:47]And you can see a year ago 3.19. So, look, Nigeria needs to just produce more oil, right? That is still the the the the the bane of the situation here.

[00:00:55]Production at 1.55 million barrels per day. That slowed, I think 1.6 in Q1 of 2026. You can see oil sector growth here 2.5. It did slow down considerably from Q4 of 6.7.

[00:01:09]And you can see but it was better than a year ago of 1.87. We just need to produce more oil. We're still heavily dependent. And you can see the production here. So, this is our 1.5 million barrels. And where is Q4 2025?

[00:01:22]Yeah, 1.54 for slightly higher than the fourth quarter of last year, but under the 1. Excuse me.

[00:01:31]Lower than the fourth quarter of last year. This is a 1.58 from 1.55. And also lower than 1.6. So, you got to produce more oil, essentially. But we're still on track for 4% you know, GDP growth thereabouts for 2026.

[00:01:49]So, meanwhile, your debate yesterday between Governor Aliyu and Otunba, I I this actually serves very well for conversations around what the states are doing with their funds and also basically where we can get data from which is the debt management office. So just a quick these numbers here basically show you that before Governor Ortom came into power he was preceded by Governor Gabriel Suswam. Now Suswam himself was preceded by Governor Akume who is the secretary to the government of the of the of the Federation. And Akume's this is the dollar debt for Benue state under him. He essentially came in so Akume left Suswam with 16.7 million of dollar debt in 20 2007 and that actually jumped to 35.7. So dollar debts under Suswam did double. So Ortom came into office 35.7 million dollars and he actually brought it it actually came down a third under Ortom. So if we get Ortom's figures here from 35 from Okay, so this is sorry this is the current governor but we need to get the the the figures for Ortom which basically show that debts went from 35 million dollars to about 24. Thank you.

[00:03:07]We've got Ortom now. So he came in with 35.7. That's is what Suswam left him and he brought it down to 29.8 million dollars. So it's went down slightly. Now Governor Alia he's only been in office for two full years. He came in in 2023 had 2024 and 2025. The dollar debt has come up under him though. So 2023 29.8 million and you can see it's at debts under him did rise by about 95% The domestic debt is where Alia's points actually is fleshed out in terms of him saying that Ortom left him a large amount of debt and again in order to look at what where we are this is your domestic debt. I think we need to start with the charts first before we round off here. Just looking at where things are like we have to show where how things grew. I should point out that for Suswam from 2007 through to yeah, 2015 This actually starts from No, this is dollar debt. Can we get our domestic debts? That actually started from 2011 to 2015. They didn't start disaggregating debts between external and domestic until 2011.

[00:04:21]All right, for some reason we can't get the chart up. But either way, the point is that Suswam's debts domestically went from a hot 16 billion to 39 billion. So it grew by 140%.

[00:04:34]There it is, finally we have the chart.

[00:04:36]So 16 billion for Suswam, this is what he left Otom. Otom was left with 13 That was actually Otom came into office and met almost 40 billion of debts.

[00:04:45]It's more than tripled under him. So Alia is correct. Governor Otom left him a lot of debts in office when he arrived. It rose by about 366% to 187 billion. And so for Governor Alia, since that particular time debt has gone from 187 billion to 107. So he's actually reduced it by about 40%.

[00:05:06]So just to settle it, the whole point of this presentation is that the Debt Management Office has all the data we need on the debts which you can use to hold the the governors accountable.

[00:05:17]Benue state is also revenue challenged.

[00:05:19]I mean, most of their money is coming from FAAC allocations. In 2024, only about 40 billion came 20 billion or so came from internally generated revenue.

[00:05:27]Okay, thank you very very much Reuters.

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