President Bola Tinubu’s Special Investigator, Jim Obazee, has urged the National Assembly to invoke its constitutional powers to review the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) 2025 audited accounts in the nation’s interest.
He specifically cited Sections 88 and 89 of the 1999 Constitution, calling on lawmakers to question whether the CBN is justified in issuing its own accounting standards and altering them at will, and whether the apex bank is still acting as a true public institution.
At the same time, Obazee called on the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) to urgently obtain and examine both the summary and fully audited 2025 CBN financial statements, and to recommend their withdrawal and restatement if irregularities are found.
He referenced Section 8(1)(b)(i) of the First Schedule of the CBN Act, 2007, which requires financial statements to give “true accounts,” and Section 8(1)(e) of the FRC Act, 2011, which mandates the Council to advise government on accounting and reporting standards.
Obazee made these comments in an eight-page analysis distributed at the commissioning of the new FRC headquarters in Lagos last Tuesday, where he also challenged the FRC to address growing concerns about the integrity of financial statements issued by government establishments.
Citing the CBN’s summary consolidated and separate financial statements for the year ended 31 December 2024—published last year without the full audited statements—Obazee emphasised that summary statements alone do not justify withholding complete annual financial disclosures. “Section 50 of the CBN Act, 2007, is clear on this,” he said.
Obazee expressed disappointment that the FRC had not previously intervened, and described the 2025 summary financial statements released on July 29, 2026, as “shocking, brazen, and vexatious.”
He argued that if these statements were the same as those transmitted to the President and National Assembly, then “the CBN has deceived the President and the National Assembly. They certainly have called every Nigerian a ‘financial reporting illiterate’ by publishing these statements on the World Wide Web.”
Obazee highlighted several issues in the 2025 accounts: fraudulent financial reporting, confusing financial direction, deceptive accounting practices, earnings management, and auditor independence.
He noted that the year-on-year figures are not comparable, pointing to page 157 of the accounts, which states that the CBN Financial Reporting Manual was applied only to the Bank from 1 January 2025, while subsidiaries and associates’ figures remained under IFRS and FRC guidelines.
“This means that virtually every apparent year-on-year movement must be treated with caution,” Obazee warned, raising four immediate forensic questions: What were the quantitative opening adjustments?, Why were comparative columns retained without restatement?, Which consolidated adjustments convert subsidiary IFRS numbers to Group policies?, and What would 2025 profit/equity have been under the former IFRS basis used for 2024?
Obazee also flagged the extremely thin equity-to-asset ratios presented: “Page 149 shows Group equity of ₦937.338 billion against assets of ₦138.856 trillion—an equity-to-asset ratio of only about 0.68%. For the CBN alone, it is approximately 0.43%. Is this the type of financial statement where comparative figures should be rendered useless to users?”
Obazee concluded by urging the FRC to confront these challenges urgently, and asked the National Assembly to exercise its oversight powers to protect public trust in Nigeria’s financial reporting system.
