Post by Chidinma Onyejiuwa (@Onyejiuwa)

Soludo vs Obi: On The Anambra Debt Brouhaha

Soludo's government says Peter Obi left Anambra drowning in $123.77 million of debt. Obi has finally answered — with figures from the Debt Management Office itself.

Soludo's entire brand is technocratic competence. If the figures are cooked, it doesn't just embarrass him — it hits the core of who he claims to be.

DMO records show:
• $30.3m — Anambra's external debt at end of 2013 (Obi left office March 2014)
• $45.15m — December 2014, nine months after he left
• 100% multilateral — World Bank/IFAD concessionary financing negotiated by the Federal Government, not commercial loans Obi took

So where did $123.77m come from? It is the sum of the contracted amounts across eight multiyear programs — not what was owed. Some, like the IFAD Value Chain programme, only started disbursing after Obi had left. The government's own document puts outstanding debt at $92.35m as of June 2026 — twelve years later.

Where the government's $123.77m comes from — traced.
It's from Information Commissioner Dr Law Mefor's press statement of 16 September 2026, "Facts Beyond Propaganda and Lies," with a follow-up on 26 September. The $123,771,179.30 is the sum of the "loan amount in USD as at date signed" column across the eight facilities; the same document lists $92,353,182 (₦127.37bn) as outstanding at 30 June 2026. So the document itself separates contracted from outstanding — the fight is over calling the contracted total "loans left by Obi."

Somebody's mathematics is not mathematicing.

In a functioning society, a supposed professor of economics brazenly lying about figures the way Soludo did with Obi's Anambra record would have triggered an investigation into how he earned his academic titles. But this is Nigeria, a country where anything goes, as long as it benefits some drug lord somewhere in the Rock.

#Infobytes #AnambraDebt #PeterObi

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