Nigeria's Unending Debt Burden, Underdevelopment, and the Paradox of Resource Abundance

Abstract

Notwithstanding exiting its debt to the international creditors in 2006 and raising the expectation that it would channel its revenues to buoying up the economy, Nigeria instead walked back to debt burden which has continued to be on a steady upward trend. Yet within the interval of obtaining the debt relief, the country had witnessed a windfall in crude oil sales but with virtually depleted foreign reserves. Consequently, the country is being plagued by economic recession and underdevelopment. This study is, therefore, prompted to interrogate this paradox of mounting debt burden and underdevelopment amidst resource abundance in Nigeria. Both empirical and descriptive methods were employed in analyzing the data which were mainly generated from secondary sources such as books, journals, official reports, etc while the study relied on the resource curse explanatory tool to draw up conclusion that the Nigeria's endless debt burden and underdevelopment is incidental to both the unfair trade and payment terms on the one hand, and the profligate utilization of the Nigerian resources by its leaders. On the strength of this, the study posited that the route to escaping Nigeria's resilient debt burden and its attendant underdevelopment is the diversification of the country's economy and prudent management of the national resources