Not a few individuals and groups, including the African Democratic Congress (ADC), have raised a fundamental constitutional and fiscal question by condemning President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s approval of the cancellation of legacy debts allegedly owed by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) to the Federation Account. At the heart of the controversy are concerns about accountability, due process, federalism, and the long-standing culture of opacity in Nigeria’s oil sector.
   
According to documents presented to the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC), about $1.42 billion and N5.57 trillion in legacy debts were written off following a reconciliation exercise, with as much as 96 per cent of dollar-denominated and 88 per cent of naira-denominated obligations cancelled.
 
The ADC argues that this was done through executive fiat, without legislative approval, and in violation of Section 162 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended), which mandates that all revenues due to the Federation be paid into the Federation Account for sharing among the three tiers of government.
  
These concerns cannot be dismissed lightly. In a federation where states and local governments are already fiscally constrained, any action that appears to shrink the distributable revenue base understandably provokes resistance. The Constitution does not envisage the Federation Account as a pool subject to unilateral presidential discretion. In that sense, the demand for transparency, due process and parliamentary oversight is legitimate and timely.
  
However, an honest appraisal of the issue must go beyond the present administration and situate the debts within their historical context. The liabilities in question did not arise under President Tinubu alone. They accumulated over many administrations, spanning the old Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) era, notorious for opaque accounting, political interference, and weak enforcement of financial obligations to the Federation.
   
Successive governments routinely acknowledged these “debts” on paper, yet made little credible effort to recover them. Reconciliation exercises were set up, committees inaugurated, figures disputed and restated year after year. In practice, much of what was labelled as debt existed in a grey zone of accounting inconsistencies, disputed claims, circular obligations between government agencies, and subsidies that were politically authorised but poorly booked.
  
The result was a recurring ritual: figures were announced, states protested, but recoveries were either negligible or non-existent. One must ask whether these efforts were ever fruitful or merely amounted to an elaborate accounting exercise that consumed time and political capital without yielding real cash to the Federation.
   
It is also important to note that NNPCL is not the same entity as the old NNPC. The Petroleum Industry Act transformed NNPC into a limited liability company, with a different legal and commercial posture. This transition raises complex questions about which obligations are legitimately transferable, which are intra-governmental bookkeeping entries, and which are no longer enforceable in strict legal terms. Failure to clearly distinguish between NNPC-era obligations and NNPCL’s balance sheet risks perpetuating confusion and undermining the credibility of the reformed national oil company.
  
That said, acknowledging these complexities does not automatically justify the method adopted by the President. Even if reconciliation showed that significant portions of the so-called debts were irrecoverable, overstated, or legally defective, the process still matters. A sweeping write-off by executive approval, without robust public disclosure and legislative engagement, fuels suspicion and weakens trust.  
  
President Tinubu may have been motivated by a desire to clean up the books, unblock FAAC processes, and allow NNPCL to operate as a commercially viable entity. Yet the question remains whether this objective could have been achieved in a more constitutionally grounded and consultative manner. A more transparent approach would have involved submitting the reconciliation outcome to the National Assembly, clearly categorising what portion of the debts were disputed, unrecoverable, settled through offsets, or extinguished by law under the PIA. Such a process would not only have strengthened constitutional compliance but also reassured states and local governments that their interests were not being arbitrarily sacrificed.
   
The way forward lies in breaking the cycle of opaque oil accounting that created this situation in the first place. Nigeria needs full public disclosure of the reconciliation details, including how figures were derived and why specific amounts were written off. Legislative oversight must be strengthened to validate any cancellation or restructuring of Federation revenues and safeguard constitutional order. There must also be clear rules on the treatment of legacy NNPC obligations versus NNPCL liabilities, to prevent future ambiguity, alongside deeper institutional reforms to ensure oil revenues due to the Federation are promptly remitted and independently audited.
   
The ADC is right to insist that Nigeria must be governed by laws, not discretion. But it is equally important to recognise that clinging to decades-old, largely unrecoverable figures does not automatically translate into fiscal justice for states. What the country needs is not just outrage or defence of executive power, but a transparent, lawful and final resolution of legacy oil-sector distortions. Only then can the Federation Account truly reflect real revenues, rather than the ghosts of an opaque past.