Press Statement – July 3, 2026
The Miideekor Environmental Development Initiative-MEDI rises today to add its voice to the chorus of well-meaning Nigerians who have watched, with mounting alarm, as their government continues to borrow against a future it has not paused to consult them about.
On July 1, 2026, the World Bank approved a fresh $1.25 billion facility for Nigeria under its new Country Partnership Framework, alongside a further $500 million for agricultural value-chain development; new debt layered onto a public debt profile that has already swollen to over N159 trillion. Nigeria’s exposure to the World Bank alone now stands at nearly $19.9 billion, some 38 percent of the country’s total external debt. This approval did not arrive quietly. It arrived over the loud, sustained, and very public objection of citizens who flooded the Bank’s own platforms demanding that the lending stop; objection so persistent that the institution moved to restrict comments rather than answer them.
We ask, plainly: whose voice was heard in this transaction? Not the fisherfolk of Bille, watching their creeks poisoned by gas eruptions with no compensation in sight. Not the families in Ogoniland, still waiting more than a decade after a UN assessment promised them cleaner water and soil. Not the market women, the okada riders, the students, who were told in 2023 that removing the fuel subsidy would make the nation richer and who have since watched their naira buy less, their transport cost more, and their government return, again and again, to foreign lenders to fill the very gap that sacrifice was meant to close.
This is the pattern we must name honestly: promises of national prosperity extracted through public hardship, followed by more borrowing dressed in the language of “reform” and “competitiveness.” It is a cycle Nigerians in the Niger Delta know intimately, because it mirrors the older story of our oil wealth drawn from beneath our feet, decisions made far above our heads, and the bill for both left on our doorstep. When a government borrows in the name of a people it neither consulted nor visibly served, when the terms of “development” are set in Washington boardrooms rather than in the communities that will carry the debt, we are not wrong to call it what it resembles: a new, indigenous colonialism; one that no longer requires a foreign flag, only a compliant signature.
MEDI does not romanticise debt-free stagnation, nor pretend that infrastructure, jobs, and power-sector reform are unworthy goals. Our objection is not to development. It is to development decided without us, financed without transparency, and repaid without regard for the communities already bearing the ecological and economic cost of extraction, while previous loans meant to have addressed power, health, education, and reform have yet to translate into felt change on the ground.
We are therefore calling on all well-meaning Nigerians : civil society, labour, students, professional bodies, and our compatriots in the diaspora to rise, not in cynicism, but in vigilance. We demand:
A nation cannot borrow its way to dignity while the people who will repay the loan are locked out of the room where it was negotiated. Nigeria’s future does not belong to its creditors. It belongs to its people and it is time our government remembered that.
Celestine AkpoBari PhD
Team Lead
Miideekor Environmental Development Initiative-MEDI