Secrets Reporters
The New Partnership for Africa’s Development, now operating as AUDA-NEPAD, represents Nigeria’s arm of a continental development body meant to drive African Union development priorities from infrastructure to agriculture. A Federal Government audit of NEPAD Nigeria’s 2023 financial year has found over ₦28.1 billion in irregularities across thirty-one findings that indicts Princess Gloria Akobundu who was head of the place when the red flag was raised.
Our reporters who went through the documents discovered that over ₦12.1 billion was flagged by federal auditors for non-maintenance of proper accounting records and suppression of documents which literally means money whose accounting trail either never existed or was actively hidden from the auditors sent to examine it.
A further nearly ₦3.5 billion represents an outright denial of access to financial records and information, meaning that even where records may have existed, NEPAD Nigeria refused to let auditors see them. And the agency separately failed to submit audited financial statements for the year under review at all.
Combined, these findings mean that over ₦15.6 billion of NEPAD Nigeria’s 2023 activity, more than half of everything wrong in this audit cannot be independently verified by anyone, because the agency either did not keep the records or would not produce them. This is the most serious category of finding a federal audit can uncover, because it forecloses the very possibility of establishing what happened to the money.
The non-submission finding is worse than it first appears. The Auditor-General’s own cross-cutting analysis, comparing every federal institution audited this cycle, found that twenty-three Ministries, Departments and Agencies failed to submit audited financial statements — and NEPAD Nigeria had the single worst record of any of them, with four consecutive years of outstanding, unsubmitted financial statements. Eleven other agencies fell short by only one year. NEPAD Nigeria’s non-compliance was four times as long. basic form of public accountability Nigerian law requires.
Princess Gloria Akobundu served as NEPAD Nigeria’s National Coordinator and Chief Executive Officer representing Nigeria at continental investment forums and infrastructure conferences during the same period these documentation failures were occurring. She was succeeded by Jabiru Salisu Abdullahi Tsauri, appointed by President Bola Tinubu in December 2024, who remains CEO today. Responsibility for the finding rests with Akobundu’s administration; the obligation to resolve them, and to explain to the National Assembly why ₦15.6 billion in agency activity left no verifiable paper trail, now rests with Tsauri.
NEPAD Nigeria’s core mandate depends on credibility with international development partners and African Union counterparts; a finding of document suppression at this scale directly undermines that credibility.
The laws broken here are among the most serious in Nigeria’s public finance framework. Section 85(2) of the 1999 Constitution guarantees the Auditor-General access to all books, records and documents relating to public accounts, violated outright by the ₦3.47 billion denial of access.
The Financial Regulations 2009 require that every institution maintain proper, complete accounting records for every transaction violated categorically by the ₦12.13 billion finding of non-maintenance and suppression. And the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007 requires timely preparation and submission of audited financial statements, a requirement NEPAD Nigeria did not meet at all.
