This paper examines the impact of public debt on infrastructural development in Nigeria from 1990 to 2025. Infrastructure is crucial for economic growth and improving living standards, however, Nigeria faces a large infrastructure deficit after decades of underinvestment. To address this, the government has borrowed substantially, both domestically and externally, to finance infrastructure projects. This study investigates how the accumulation of public debt and debt servicing has affected capital expenditure and infrastructure outcomes. An autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model is employed to estimate the influence of external debt, domestic debt, and debt servicing on capital expenditure over the period. The results indicate that external debt has a positive but insignificant relationship with capital expenditure, while domestic debt is positively and significantly related to capital expenditure on infrastructure. However, debt servicing exhibits a negative association. This implies increasing domestic borrowing could enhance infrastructure development more than external financing. However, the debt burden constrains infrastructure investment. The study concludes that rising debt has not translated into commensurate gains in infrastructure quantity and quality, underscoring deeper institutional and governance challenges. Effective reforms are needed to ensure debt is invested productively to improve infrastructure. Prudent debt management and greater accountability in executing projects can help strike a balance between infrastructure financing needs and fiscal sustainability.
Keywords: Capital Expenditure, Debt Servicing, Public Debt, infrastructure development
