The Ethics of Debt and Structural Adjustment: A Philosophical Analysis of Nigeria’s Multilateral Borrowing and Its Impact on the Poor

This study provides a philosophical analysis of the ethics of sovereign debt and structural adjustment, examining whether Nigeria's multilateral borrowing from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank from the 1980s to the present constitutes an identifiable moral injustice to Nigeria's poorest citizens in the South South and North East geopolitical zones. The ethics of international debt is a relatively underdeveloped field in moral philosophy despite its profound practical consequences for billions of people, and this gap is particularly acute in the African philosophical literature. A mixed-methods philosophical design is employed, combining systematic philosophical analysis of debt ethics from Thomas Pogge, Jubilee debt ethics, and African economic philosophy with a qualitative study of 35 interviews with development economists, civil society debt advocates, and philosophy academics in Port Harcourt and Maiduguri. Documentary analysis of IMF Structural Adjustment Programme conditionality documents and their social consequences in Nigeria from 2019 to 2024 provides the case material. Findings establish that the moral responsibility for the harm caused by structural adjustment conditionalities is distributed across Nigerian government institutions, multilateral lending agencies, and donor country governments, and that none of these actors has adequately acknowledged or remedied their respective contributions to structural harm. The study contributes an original philosophical framework for assigning moral responsibility in sovereign debt relationships. Keywords: debt ethics, structural adjustment, global justice, Nigeria, IMF.