By Secrets Reporters
Note 10 of the audited financial statements of NNPC Limited for 2025, examined by SecretsReporters, records security expenses at N129,116 million for the group. Against the same line, the parent company, NNPC Limited itself, spent N2,970 million. Arithmetic on the two printed figures places N126,146 million of the security bill inside the subsidiaries of the group, which is over ninety seven per cent of the total.
The 164 pages of the annual report name no security contractor, no security firm, no guard company and no government agency paid out of the line. They do not divide the bill by subsidiary, by asset, by state or by service. The accounts that Group Chief Executive Officer Bayo Ojulari presented to President Bola Tinubu on 12 October 2026 state what guarding the group cost the Federation in 2025 to the nearest million, and name nobody who was guarded, nobody who did the guarding and nothing that was guarded. The same line stood at N271,370 million in 2024, when the parent company itself carried N141,516 million of it.
A Second Security Bill Inside the Cost of Making Oil
The N129,116 million is not the whole of what the statements charge for protection. Note 8 of the accounts, the cost of sales note, carries a line called insurance and security expenses at N182,197 million for the group in 2025, charged inside the cost of producing and selling crude oil and gas. That line merges insurance and security into one figure and divides it nowhere, so the security portion of the N182,197 million cannot be read from the accounts at all. A third line, insurance expenses in Note 10, stands at N89,289 million for the group. Security or insurance therefore appears in the statements in three separate places, under three separate labels, in two separate notes, and no note reconciles any one of them against the others.
Adding the two lines that carry the word security gives N311,313 million, but the addition cannot be completed honestly, because an unknown part of the second line is insurance and an unknown part of the security of the group is not in either line. The total cost of securing NNPC in 2025 cannot be computed from the accounts NNPC published.
The Third Channel, Charged to the Federation
A third channel of security spending runs through the balance sheet, and it dwarfs the two expense lines. Note 24 of the statements records other receivables from the Federation at N11,201,028 million for the group at 31 December 2025, and defines the balance in the words of the note itself as advance payment to Federation and the security costs incurred in protecting the oil and gas assets, incurred under a framework of approval between the Government of Nigeria and the group under which the group incurs security costs and charges them to the Federation. That figure is a balance owed at the end of the year. It is not a statement of what was spent on security in 2025, and the note gives no split between the advances and the accumulated asset protection costs inside it, no contractor, no asset and no year by year build up of the protection element. Note 24 also records that no new energy security expense was recognised in 2025, and that the energy security cost balance of N8,671,574 million carried into the year was defrayed in a reconciliation with government agencies concluded in September 2025, netted against royalties, taxes and dividends. The statements therefore describe a Federation that owes NNPC a balance partly built out of protecting oil and gas assets, settled in part by offset, without ever stating what the protection cost in the year under report, or who provided it.
Three Numbers, No Reconciliation
The three channels are never brought together. The expense note gives N129,116 million with the parent company carrying less than three per cent of it. The cost of sales note gives N182,197 million in which security cannot be separated from insurance. The receivables note gives an N11,201,028 million balance in which security cannot be separated from advances. No accounting policy note explains why one naira of security lands in general and administrative expenses, another inside the cost of sales and another on the balance sheet as a claim on the Federation. No note names the subsidiaries inside which over ninety seven per cent of the expensed bill sits, and the group structure spans upstream production, pipelines and storage, refining, shipping and retail, each with its own exposure and its own arrangements. A reader holding the full audited statements cannot answer, from anything in them, what NNPC spent on security in 2025, which companies or agencies received the money, or which assets it protected.
What the Standards Require
NNPC Limited is constituted by section 53 of the Petroleum Industry Act 2021 as a company whose shares are held on behalf of the Federation, and its statements are prepared under International Financial Reporting Standards, under which material items of expense are to be presented in a manner that informs the reader of their nature. Requirement 2.6 of the EITI Standard addresses the financial transparency of state owned enterprises, and Requirement 6.2 addresses quasi fiscal expenditures, the category into which spending carried for the state outside the budget, including asset protection charged back to the Federation, falls to be reported. The Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007 frames the accountability expected of enterprises that hold and spend Federation resources. A security bill of N129,116 million expensed with no payee named, a further N182,197 million in which security is inseparable from insurance, and an N11.2 trillion Federation balance with the protection element inside it unquantified, meet the form of disclosure.
