By Mohammed Bello Doka
Let us begin with a number so monstrous, so preposterous, that it defies the laws of arithmetic and common sense alike: two hundred and ten trillion naira. That is the figure the Senate Public Accounts Committee thrust upon former NNPCL chief Mele Kyari when it declared him wanted like a common fugitive. Two hundred and ten trillion naira unaccounted for, they screamed. And for a brief, explosive moment, Nigeria believed it. Social media caught fire. Newspapers sold like pure water on a Harmattan afternoon. Kyari, the man who had run the country’s oil behemoth for years, was suddenly a cartoon villain, a financial monster who had swallowed a nation’s budget many times over.
But then the numbers were examined, and the monster began to dissolve like morning mist. The total revenue generated by the NNPCL between 2017 and 2023, the period under review, was approximately fifty-four point five trillion naira. Pause and let that sink in. How can a man fail to account for two hundred and ten trillion from a pot that only held fifty-four point five trillion? It is mathematically impossible, a logical suicide. Even the former NNPCL Chief Financial Officer, Umar Ajiya, had to step forward to explain the absurdity. The so-called missing sum, he said, was not missing cash at all. It was an accumulation of one hundred and three trillion naira in accrued expenses, money the company had promised to pay but had not yet paid, and another one hundred and seven trillion naira in receivables, money owed to the company by others. In other words, paper promises, not physical currency. No bags of naira vanished. No offshore accounts swallowed the loot. Just accounting entries that any competent finance officer would recognise as normal.
Yet the damage was done. The headline had already travelled faster than any correction ever could. Mele Kyari is now and forever, in the minds of millions of Nigerians, the man who stole two hundred and ten trillion naira. His children will hear it in school. His neighbours will whisper it at funerals. His friends will measure every gift against an impossible fortune they believe he hides. No court acquittal, no Senate reversal, no forensic audit will ever wash away that number. It has been branded onto his name with a hot iron of political malice.
And that, dear reader, is precisely the point.
This was never about accountability. It was about a very old and very dirty trick in the playbook of power: tarnish the reputation of a prominent northerner, hang an absurd figure around his neck, and then watch as the public does the rest. We have seen this exact script before. Recall Abubakar Malami, the former Attorney General of the Federation. Newspapers screamed that he had presided over the disappearance of trillions of naira from recovered Abacha loot. There was talk of duplicated recoveries, of phantom funds, of a conspiracy so vast it could only be explained by evil genius. But when the prosecution finally crawled to court, what were the charges? A few billion naira here, some money laundering there. A fraction of the headline numbers. The trillions evaporated, but the public memory of Malami did not.
Recall Nasir El-Rufai, the former governor of Kaduna. During his tenure, media headlines blazed with accusations of over four hundred and twenty-two billion naira missing from state coffers. Some publications put the figure even higher. The man was painted as an emperor of looting, a northern prince who had turned Kaduna into his personal ATM. Yet when the EFCC eventually moved, the charges filed in court focused on an eleven billion naira rail project, a few hundred million in illegal possession, and contract breaches that amounted to a tiny sliver of the original accusation. The trillions and billions that had been shouted from every rooftop quietly disappeared from the narrative. But El-Rufai’s name? That remains stained.
Now comes Mele Kyari, following the same well-worn path. First, the deafening roar of an impossible figure. Then the quiet procedural retreat. The full Senate reversed the committee’s declaration, saying that no committee has the power to declare anyone wanted without the express approval of the Senate President. A technicality, they called it. But every Nigerian with two brain cells to rub together knows that a technicality is just a polite word for a cover-up. The committee overreached, yes, but who sent them? Who allowed the story to run for forty-eight hours, long enough to destroy a man’s reputation, before the lifeline was thrown? That is the cruelty of the tactic. You let the accusation breathe just long enough to kill the character. Then you pull it back, smile, and say, mistake.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plutarch once wrote, The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. But in Nigerian political warfare, the opposite is true. The public mind is treated as a dumpster. You throw a matchstick of a lie into a pile of headline rubbish, and the fire of outrage burns for years. No amount of truth can extinguish it. Another philosopher, Seneca, warned, He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it. The Senate leadership could have stopped the committee before it ever declared Kyari wanted. They did not. They allowed it. They encouraged it. And then they played the saviour.
Now let us speak of the bitter irony that makes this betrayal almost unbearable. Mele Kyari is not an enemy of President Bola Tinubu. By all available accounts, he is one of the men who helped secure Tinubu’s victory in the chaotic 2023 election. As the political tension mounted, with the CBN’s naira redesign policy strangling cash and the opposition smelling blood, there was another plot brewing. The word in the corridors was that Kyari was under immense pressure to create an artificial fuel scarcity across the country. The goal was simple: make life unbearable, turn the people against the ruling APC candidate, and hand victory to the northern alternative.
Sunday Wale Adeniran, a commentator with known ties to the Tinubu camp, posted on Facebook a detailed account of Kyari’s resistance. In that post, which has since become a quiet legend of the campaign, Adeniran wrote: The pressure was immense. He must ensure that there was no fuel throughout the country but Mele Kyari believed strongly that Nigerians should not be punished further after experiencing lack of money in the system just because of one man’s ambition. He chose the path of patriotism. He was promised that he would retain his position of the NNPCL CEO but he chose to be patriotic instead. He was also told to remember that he’s from NE like Siddik ( Atiku) but he stuck to his gun of remaining a patriot.
So when President Tinubu reappointed Kyari as head of the NNPCL, Adeniran was not surprised. Kyari, he said, was a direct opposite of Emefiele, who accepted to subject Nigerians to avoidable suffering because he was promised not only protection but even appointment to higher office under a Siddik ( Atiku) presidency. In other words, Kyari refused to weaponise fuel. He refused to sabotage the election. He chose Nigeria over tribe and over ambition. And how did Tinubu repay him? By allowing a Senate committee to hang a two hundred and ten trillion naira albatross around his neck.
This is the politics of biting the northern fingers that made him. El-Rufai campaigned tirelessly against the naira redesign, travelled the length of the north, and risked his political capital to deliver votes. His reward? Denied a ministerial slot and now facing EFCC probes. Malami served as Attorney General throughout Buhari’s eight years, navigated the treacherous waters of loot recovery, and aligned with the Tinubu project at the crucial moment. His reward? Publicly shamed with trillion-naira allegations that never stuck in court. Kyari saved the fuel supply, ensured that the election did not collapse into economic chaos, and kept his loyalty when it mattered most. His reward? The monster number that will follow him to the grave.
What the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu called the supreme art of war, subduing the enemy without fighting, has been perfected by Tinubu’s circle. You do not need to jail a northern politician. You do not need to prove theft in court. You simply need to release an astronomical figure to the press, let the committee do the dirty work, and then quietly reverse the decision after the damage is done. The man remains free. His position may even be secure. But his name is ruined. His family looks at him differently. His friends calculate his supposed billions. And the political message to every other northern elite is loud and clear: we can destroy you anytime we wish.
Let this be a warning to the northern political class. You who sit comfortably today, thinking that your loyalty to the current administration will protect you. You who whisper that Kyari was treated fairly because he kept his job, that El-Rufai brought his troubles upon himself, that Malami was never truly a victim. Look again. The pattern is not a coincidence. It is a strategy. First they embrace you, then they use you, then they brand you with a number so large that no explanation can ever erase it. Today it is Kyari. Tomorrow it will be another northern figure who once thought himself indispensable.
The Greek historian Thucydides wrote, The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. But the northern elite are not weak. They have votes, they have influence, they have history. Yet they sit and watch as one of their own is dragged through the mud of an impossible allegation, only to be rescued by the same hand that pushed him into the pit. That is not rescue. That is rehearsal. The same script will be pulled out again when a new northern finger needs to be bitten. The question is not whether it will happen. The question is who will be next and whether the rest will finally see the pattern before it is too late.
For Mele Kyari, the damage is done. Even if every court in Nigeria declares him innocent, the number two hundred and ten trillion will follow him to the grave. His grandchildren will hear it whispered. And in the cold arithmetic of power, that is all that was ever intended. Not justice. Not accountability. Just a ruin so complete that it wears the mask of an audit query. The fingers that fed have been bitten. The question now is how many more northern leaders will offer their hands.
