Nigeria will pay an interest of 11.85 percent per annum on the $3.3 billion “pre-export finance facility” (PxF) facilitated by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Ltd and arranged by Afrexim Bank. A similar cocoa-backed $800 million facility arranged for Ghana by its cocoa marketing board attracts an interest of 8 percent per annum.
Bilateral lenders, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), would typically charge 1-3 percent with a longer tenor. In the details seen by TheCable, Nigeria pledged a total of 164.25 million barrels of crude oil — at 90,000 barrels per day — starting from 2024 to repay the loan through Project Gazelle Funding Ltd, an “orphan” special purpose vehicle (SPV) incorporated in Bahamas for the PxF. Effectively, the NNPC has pledged 38.58 percent of five years’ worth of tax and royalty oil to secure the loan.
The national oil company announced in August 2023 that the PxF was to support the federal government “in its ongoing fiscal and monetary policy reforms aimed at stabilizing the exchange rate market”, describing it as “a relief for the naira”. It called the facility “crude oil repayment” with an upfront cash loan “against proceeds from a limited amount of future crude oil production”.
