Honoured for a career built on financial accountability, former Financial Reporting Council boss Jim Obazee chose the moment to sound an alarm.
His target was the Central Bank of Nigeria, whose latest financial statements he said raise profound questions about transparency, governance and public accountability.
For more than a decade, Jim Osayande Obazee occupied one of the most influential regulatory offices in Nigeria’s financial system. As the last Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Accounting Standards Board and the pioneer Chief Executive of the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), he helped shape the country’s migration to modern financial reporting standards and built the institution responsible for policing corporate financial disclosures.
That pedigree made his remarks in Lagos on Tuesday impossible to dismiss as the complaints of a distant observer.
Standing before regulators, accountants and financial reporting professionals during the commissioning of the Financial Reporting Council’s new headquarters, Obazee abandoned the customary congratulatory speech expected on such occasions. Instead, he delivered a painstaking critique of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s 2025 Summary Consolidated and Separate Financial Statements, questioning not only the quality of the apex bank’s financial reporting but also the conduct of its auditors and the effectiveness of regulatory oversight.
His conclusion was blunt.
The Financial Reporting Council, he said, should immediately demand both the published summary accounts and the complete audited financial statements from the Central Bank, review them without delay and, if his observations prove correct, recommend that the accounts be withdrawn and restated so they present what the law describes as “true accounts.”
The recommendation amounts to one of the most consequential public challenges ever made by a former head of Nigeria’s accounting regulator against the country’s monetary authority.
Rather than concentrating on the headline figures contained in the published accounts, Obazee focused on the accounting architecture behind them. His principal complaint was that the Central Bank had released only summary financial statements while withholding the full audited accounts, despite statutory provisions requiring a complete set of annual financial statements. In his view, the omission denied Nigerians, lawmakers, investors and financial analysts the disclosures necessary to understand the institution’s true financial position.
What particularly troubled him was the bank’s own acknowledgment that the 2025 figures were prepared under a newly introduced CBN Financial Reporting Manual while the previous year’s statements followed International Financial Reporting Standards. The published accounts expressly stated that the two years were “not comparable.”
For Obazee, that single declaration undermined one of the central purposes of financial reporting.
Comparative figures, he argued, are not decorative tables inserted for historical reference. They allow governments, investors, regulators and citizens to measure performance over time, identify trends, assess accountability and understand changes in financial position. Once an institution declares those figures non-comparable without providing reconciliations, the reliability of year-on-year analysis is fundamentally weakened.
He questioned why comparative columns remained in the published statements if management itself acknowledged that meaningful comparison was impossible.
His criticism extended far beyond presentation.
Obazee identified what he described as inconsistencies in accounting policies governing foreign exchange revaluation, derivative accounting, expected credit loss calculations and the treatment of deferred liquidity management costs. Several of those policies, he suggested, created opportunities for postponing the recognition of expenditure and thereby influencing reported earnings.
One policy attracted particular attention.
The CBN’s accounting framework allows certain liquidity management costs—including interest expenses arising from open market operations—to be deferred and recognised as assets before being amortised over as many as four years.
For Obazee, that raised obvious questions.
What economic asset, he asked, was actually being created? How much expenditure had been deferred? Who authorised the deferrals? What would the bank’s reported profit have looked like had those costs been recognised immediately rather than spread across future reporting periods?
Those questions, he suggested, deserved forensic examination rather than routine audit review.
His speech also revisited one of the most politically sensitive issues surrounding the Central Bank in recent years—the advances extended to the Federal Government under Section 38 of the CBN Act.
Referring to disclosures in the published statements, Obazee questioned the treatment of advances approaching ₦3 trillion and argued that the accompanying accounting disclosures failed to answer critical questions about statutory compliance, interest recognition and repayment requirements.
He also criticised the omission of what auditors themselves described as Key Audit Matters from the publicly released summary accounts, arguing that withholding the complete audit report deprived users of information necessary to understand the auditors’ most significant findings.
The criticism did not stop with the Central Bank.
Obazee also turned his attention to the Financial Reporting Council itself.
Addressing current management, he urged the regulator to strengthen its inspection and investigative functions, insisting that highly technical financial reporting reviews should be conducted by permanent professional staff rather than outsourced consultants so that institutional expertise remains within the Council.
He warned that the quality of financial statements now emerging from several public institutions had deteriorated to a level demanding urgent regulatory intervention.
Nor were the external auditors spared.
Obazee questioned whether the provision of internal control services by the same audit firms responsible for reviewing the Central Bank’s financial reporting created issues requiring closer examination from an auditor-independence perspective. Although he stopped short of alleging professional misconduct, he argued that the circumstances warranted careful scrutiny because public confidence depends as much on the appearance of independence as on independence itself.
His final observations broadened the debate beyond the Central Bank.
Citing public reports concerning approximately ₦210 trillion reflected in the accounts of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), he urged the Financial Reporting Council not to wait for legislative referral but to obtain the company’s financial statements independently, review them and provide Nigerians with authoritative regulatory conclusions.
The speech transformed what had been planned as a ceremonial commissioning into an unusually candid conversation about transparency, regulatory accountability and confidence in Nigeria’s financial reporting system.
Coming from the architect of the institution charged with enforcing accounting standards, it was more than a technical critique.
It was a public challenge to the institutions responsible for ensuring that Nigeria’s most powerful public bodies remain accountable not only for the money they manage but also for the way they explain it.
