The 2023 Appropriation Act, as signed by President Muhammadu Buhari on 3 January 2023 and amended by President Bola Tinubu via the 2023 Supplementary Appropriation Act of November 2023, projected a federal fiscal deficit of ₦11.34 trillion — the largest in nominal naira terms in Nigerian history at the time of recording, and the largest in real terms since the structural-adjustment years of 1986–88.
The deficit was financed through: (i) ₦7.04 trillion of new domestic borrowing (FGN Bonds, Sukuk and Treasury Bills); (ii) ₦1.76 trillion of new external borrowing (Eurobond reopen and concessional facilities); (iii) ₦206 billion from privatisation proceeds; and (iv) a residual financed by 'Ways and Means' overdrafts from the Central Bank that were the subject of a separate ₦22.7 trillion securitisation passed by the National Assembly in May 2023.
Debt service in 2023 ran at ₦8.95 trillion against retained federal revenue of ₦11.88 trillion — a debt-service-to-revenue ratio of 75% for the year, with several individual months above 90% before the post-subsidy-removal revenue uplift began to feed through in Q4 2023. The 2023 deficit set the baseline against which the 2024 Appropriation Act's ₦9.18 trillion projected deficit and the 2025 Act's ₦13.08 trillion projected deficit have been measured. The Debt Management Office's Q4 2023 report placed total public debt at ₦97.34 trillion at year-end (a step-jump from ₦46.25 trillion at the close of 2022, driven principally by the Ways and Means securitisation and the unification of the exchange rate on 14 June 2023, which restated foreign-currency debt at the market rate).