N210 trillion: Nigeria’s numbers problem

By MAHMUD JAFAR The easiest way to rile Nigeria on the matter of public finance is to throw a number of endless zeroes at us and call it missing money. Nobody needs to explain the ledger from which it was drawn, or the accounting convention that produced it, or whether the sum describes cash that once sat in a vault. Within an hour it has travelled through the group chats, been converted into hospitals unbuilt and roads untarred, and hardened into an article of faith no clarification can dislodge, and what follows is an instant screaming match in which the loudest participants are frequently those least equipped to read a balance sheet.

This was the pattern that greeted the claim that N210 trillion had gone missing from the books of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, a figure roughly four times the size of the national budget, tossed around like a stale pancake until it arrived, unexamined, at a Senate committee hearing. I cannot be the only Nigerian disappointed that a farce of a figure travelled that far before anybody interrogated its arithmetic. My consolation is that the hearing served as a lecture, delivered by a man, Bala Wunti, who understood both the numbers and the industry that produced them well enough to take the chamber through the reasoning rather than around it.

The N210 trillion, he explained, appears nowhere in the 2023 Audited Financial Statements of the company. It was manufactured by adding N107 trillion in receivables to N103 trillion in payables, which is to say by adding money owed to the company to money owed by the company and presenting the sum as a hole. Anyone who has run a provisions shop in Wuse Market knows that what your customers owe you and what you owe your suppliers belong on opposite sides of the ledger.

The second layer of the confusion is structural, and here institutional memory is worth more than any spreadsheet. Following the Petroleum Industry Act, the company began operating two distinct accounts, a shareholders’ account and a commercial account, with NAPIMS, now NUIMS, running the former and the corporate headquarters the latter. Because NUIMS remains a subsidiary, its inflows and outflows must also reflect on the main account.

Someone unfamiliar with that architecture, encountering one transaction represented in two places, would reasonably suspect duplication or concea…