Nigeria’s ruling party, APC, whose candidate, Bola Tinubu, won the presidential election last month, has kept majorities in the Senate and among state governors, according to the Independent National Electoral Commission.
Along with that, the party has secured most seats in the House of Representatives among all parties.
It obtained 57 out of 109 seats in the Senate, 162 out of 360 in the House of Representatives, and a minimum of 19 governorships out of 36.
However, despite having the majority in the Senate and among governors, the one in the House of Representatives has not been secured, as 11 seats in the upper chamber and 35 in the lower chamber are yet to be declared.
While Tinubu is waiting for his inauguration that is scheduled for the end of May, the runners-up in the last presidential election – the Peoples Democratic Party's Atiku Abubakar and the Labour Party's Peter Obi – are trying to challenge the official results in court.
Muhammadu Buhari, the lame-duck president from whom Tinubu is going to take the reins, has been facing a slew of challenges for the country, including Boko Haram's* violence, massive foreign debt, and so on. Now, the president-elect and his party are expected to shoulder the burden of tackling these issues.
Last year, touching on the government's response to the remaining issues, Nigeria's First Lady, Buhari's wife, Aisha Muhammadu Buhari apologized to Nigerians over the performance of her husband and the APC, saying they might have not performed to the full satisfaction and expectations of the people, as cited by the press.
"The government has really tried. The administration has done their best but maybe it is still not the best for others. To them, they have done their best, only God knows, so we must apologize to them, to Nigerians; whether we have made up their expectations or not," she said.
In their first major test, Tinubu and the newly-elected administration are expected first to remove gasoline subsidies, which cost the government $10 billion last year. A pledge by the president-elect to deal with the issue was made during his campaign and is aimed at easing the nation's public debt, which is estimated to hit approximately $167 billion in June 2023, according to Nigeria Employers Consultative Association.
In line with the data provided by the Debt Management Office of Nigeria, the country's total public debt amounted to about $101.9 billion at the end of September 2022 with $39.66 billion in external obligations.
Earlier this month, outgoing President Buhari castigated international financial organizations for their "unfair" debt architecture, saying they favor only advanced nations.
Along with that, he called on developed and developing nations to offer duty-free and quota-free market access to the 46 countries on the UN’s least-developed countries list, the majority of which come from Africa.
That said, Nigeria is not the only African country suffering from the burden of external debt.
For instance, in February, speaking on local radio, Zambia's President Hakainde Hichilema also criticized the "suicidal" interest rates trotted out by international financial organizations, calling them a "black mamba kiss of death." Ghana is another country on the list, which is unable to pay its public debt totaling $37.4 billion as of October 2022.
By and large, according to a 2022 report by the World Bank, more than half of low-income countries, most of which are African, cannot meet their obligations on paying foreign debts.
*A terrorist organization outlawed in Russia and many other countries.