Let’s be honest about something first: Nigerians are tired.
Tired of fuel queues. Tired of subsidy removal “for our own good.” Tired of watching naira lose value every single month while officials who manage our most important national asset can’t even produce books that add up.
So when news broke this week that the Senate Committee on Public Accounts ordered the arrest of former NNPC boss Mele Kyari over a ₦210 trillion gap in the company’s accounts, the anger that followed online wasn’t surprising. It was overdue.
But here’s what should make that anger even hotter — not cooler.
NNPC’s defence isn’t “we don’t know where the money went.” Their defence is that it’s not money at all.
“Trust Us, It’s Just Paperwork”
According to NNPC’s own written response to the Senate, the ₦210 trillion gap — covering 2017 to 2023 — breaks down into ₦103 trillion they’re calling “accrued expenses” and ₦107 trillion they’re calling “receivables.” In plain English: don’t worry, it’s just money we say we owe, and money we say we’re owed.
The Senate committee rejected this. Good. Because it doesn’t hold up.
Part of that ₦103 trillion was apparently paid out in cash to joint venture partners in 2023.
There’s a small problem with that — cash payments of that kind were banned back in 2016, under the Buhari administration.
So either NNPC is admitting to making payments through a channel that officially doesn’t exist, or the figures were cooked up to fill a gap after the fact. Neither option is good. Both should make you furious.
And then there’s Umar Ajiya, NNPC’s own former CFO, who came out and said the whole ₦210 trillion claim doesn’t even make mathematical sense — because NNPC’s total revenue for that entire seven-year stretch was only about ₦54.5 trillion. You read thaPaperwork
The “gap” is nearly four times bigger than everything the company earned in the period it’s supposed to be explaining.
So pick one: either NNPC is sitting on the largest unexplained accounting hole in Nigerian corporate history, or someone — somewhere — has been cooking the books to make a scandal disappear into spreadsheet language. Either way, Nigerians are the ones paying for it.
While We’re Told There’s “No Money”
Here’s the part that should really get under your skin.
While this accounting mess sat unresolved for years, ordinary Nigerians were told — over and over — that there’s no money.
No money to properly fund public universities, where lecturers go on strike for months because salaries can’t be paid.
No money for healthcare, where Nigerians die from preventable illnesses because hospitals lack basic equipment.
No money for fuel subsidies, a removal that hit every single household in this country overnight.
Meanwhile, NNPC — the company at the centre of all of this — is now telling a Senate committee that ₦210 trillion in its books is just “paperwork.”
You don’t need an economics degree to feel the contradiction.
If a company can casually generate a ₦210 trillion accounting discrepancy and call it routine, but the country it operates in can’t find the money to keep universities open — something is fundamentally broken, and it isn’t the universities.
“Dead or Alive” Sounds Strong. Does It Mean Anything?
Senator Adams Oshiomhole told the committee Kyari should be brought “dead or alive.” It made headlines.
It felt good to read, honestly — finally, someone in the National Assembly sounding as angry as the rest of us.
But Nigerians have heard this kind of language before. The subsidy fraud probes. The fuel importation scandals.
The endless NEITI audit reports flagging billions in unaccounted oil revenue, year after year. Each time, there’s outrage. Summons. Dramatic quotes. And then — nothing. The story quietly disappears, and a new outrage takes its place.
So forgive the scepticism. An arrest order is a start. It is not accountability.
Accountability would mean Kyari sitting in front of that committee, in person, under oath, answering for each of the 19 specific audit queries the Auditor-General raised — not a written statement crafted by lawyers, and not another disappearing act citing medical treatment abroad.
What Nigerians Actually Deserve Here
This isn’t really about whether ₦210 trillion is “real” money sitting somewhere, waiting to fund free PhDs and bullet trains. That fantasy makes for a good Facebook post, but it’s not how this plays out.
What Nigerians actually deserve is simpler — and harder to get an honest answer.
A full, independently verified explanation of how a company managing the nation’s most valuable resource can produce financial statements with a hole this size in them, while millions of Nigerians can’t afford to keep their children in school.
If it turns out to be incompetence on a historic scale — Nigerians deserve to know that, and deserve to see consequences.
If it turns out to be something worse, Nigerians deserve that too, in full, not buried in a committee report nobody reads six months from now.
Either way, the people who have spent years being told “there’s no money” have every right to be angry that ₦210 trillion in confusion sat quietly in NNPC’s books while they were the ones tightening their belts.
That anger isn’t misplaced. The only question now is whether anyone in power is going to do something with it — or whether, like every scandal before it, this one gets explained away in spreadsheet language until Nigerians simply move on.