The concept debt has different views. The simplest view is that debt is the state of owing something, money, goods or services. In another words, it is an amount of money borrowed by one party from another.
Looking at debt from the financial intermediary perspective, it is when government borrows funds (which increase its gross financial labour) in order to make loan to both individuals and institution ( Chouraqui J.C, Jones B. etal n.d) In net term it is the deducting of certain asserts from the government financial assets. (Irwin 2015).
The concept debt is not a new phenomenon; it has been but metamorphosed over time. Debt has historical relationship with social institution such as government, war, marriage etc. it has been recorded that debt has been for the last five thousand years the fulcrum not only of forms of oppression but of popular struggle.( Graeber D. 2009)
The recent time, most notably from 1971 onwards has been recorded as the era of the empire of debt. This era might be said to have been initiated on 15 August 1971, when US President Richard Nixon officially suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold and effectively created the current floating currency regimes. This has led to the regime in which consumer purchases in wealthy countries rarely involve even paper money, and national economies are driven largely by consumer debt.( Graeber D. 2009)
Piling of debt has led to debt crises which are periodic and have become the stuff of uprisings, mobilisations and revolutions ( Graeber D. 2009). The Debt crises confronting the developing world and Africa to be precise is as a result of the legacies of the integration of the developing countries into global capitalism. This has pushed this countries to the brink of financial catastrophe since the early 1980s ( Okpeh Ochayi Okpeh Jr,2011 p585).
In recent times, debt has been seen as one of the main ways capitalism has managed to perpetuate itself through the creation of financial institution in the 1980s, such as World Bank, International Monetary Funds (IMF) (Graeber,2012) that promote Financialisation and Foreign Aid which is given at a cost that the borrowing country is unable to meet thus leading to dependency on the creditor majorly the West such U.S.A.(Oliseh K. 2015) . Through the above, debt crises have become a cantankerous problem and the noose that fastened the countries in Africa, Asia, South America to the global capitalist system (Attah N. 2009 p.42)
The most common forms of debt are loans, which include mortgages and auto loans and credit card debt. In a national and international scope it involves national debt, public debt, foreign debt, domestic debt, odious debt etc. ( Vikram nehru and Mark Thomas, 2008.
The Concept of Debt encompasses so much more than has been discussed above namely simplest perception of debt, financial intermediary perspective, historical perspective of debt, forms of debts to mention a few.
