Seventeen Days Before the 2023 Election, $6.23 Million Left the Central Bank's Vault in Cash. Every Approval Behind It Is Now Said to Be Forged, and the Only Trial About It May Be About to End.

On Tuesday, in a courtroom in Maitama, Godwin Emefiele's lawyer stood up and asked Justice Hamza Muazu to end the trial of the former Central Bank governor without calling him to defend himself. The application is called a no case submission, and the argument for it fits in one sentence: after two years and nine months and more than a dozen prosecution witnesses, nothing before the court shows Emefiele's hand on the paper that took $6.23 million out of the bank's vault. The judge reserved his ruling. He will send for the parties when he has one.

I have read the reports of every witness who has testified about that money, and I think the application has a real chance. I want to explain why that is not good news, even for people who take it for granted that Emefiele is guilty, and why the problem is not really him at all.

Start with what nobody disputes. On February 8, 2023, seventeen days before Nigerians voted for a president, the Central Bank's Garki branch in Abuja counted out $6,230,000 in cash and handed it to a man named Jubrin Abubakar. The counting is on CCTV. The paperwork was a letter dated January 26 on the letterhead of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, reference SGF.43/L.01/201, headed "Re: Presidential Directive on Foreign Election Observer Missions", carrying what looked like President Buhari's approval and citing a Federal Executive Council decision at the council's "187th" meeting on January 18. The letter asked for the naira equivalent, about N2.9 billion at the time. The branch paid dollars.

Boss Mustapha, whose office the letter claimed to come from, testified in February 2024 that it did not. He had never seen it. He first heard of the money from the news in December 2023. Correspondence under the presidential seal does not carry a reference number. Council decisions go out as extracts, not letters. The January 18 meeting was the first of the year, not the 187th. Buhari did not close his letters with "please accept the assurance of my highest regard". The signature, he said, was a failed attempt at Buhari's. He had no record of any Jubrin Abubakar, who is not a member of his staff. And the presidency does not pay election observers at all. That is INEC's business. A forensic examiner told the court the next month that neither Buhari's signature nor Mustapha's was written by the man it belongs to.

So the paper was forged. The question the trial has spent two years on is by whom and for whom, and that is where it has gone wrong. Michael Onyeka Ogbu, the deputy director who controlled the Abuja branch, said at first that the request bore the approvals of Buhari and Emefiele, then conceded under cross examination that Emefiele's name is not on the document and he did not sign it. "He did not come to tell me that I should approve the payment. I only acted on what is on the paper." The letter reached the Director of Banking Services on February 6 with no stamp from the governor's office. Ogbu paid, he said, on the understanding that the money would be refunded, and wrote letters asking for it back until November 2023. Then in January this year a CBN assistant director named Bashirudden Maishanu told the court the part of the story the paperwork leaves out. A man calling himself Alhaji Ahmed, who said he worked on a special committee in the SGF's office and had been sent by Emefiele's personal assistant, told him the payment was being processed on the authority of the President and wanted it in cash. Maishanu sent a friend. The friend and his driver collected the dollars at Garki and were dropped at a clubhouse on Ibrahim Coomasie Crescent, where Ahmed left $2.5 million with them. Maishanu told the court that he and two friends agreed to keep it. He said he was sure the approval was fraudulent. He also said the bank's board never disciplined him.

In April the EFCC's own investigator, under cross examination, supplied the rest. No forensic examination was ever done on the signature attributed to Emefiele, which Emefiele told interrogators was forged too. The five CBN officers who signed the internal memo were suspended by the bank. None is on trial. A lawyer named Ifeanyi Omeke had told investigators he received money on Emefiele's behalf; Emefiele was never interviewed about it. The second name on the charge, Odoh Ocheme, is described in the commission's own filing as at large. The special investigator the President appointed in 2023 announced that year that video showed Emefiele and Mustapha removing cash from the vault. Mustapha is a prosecution witness. When the prosecution answered on Tuesday, its case on the vault came down to this: the bank's own system alerts the governor whenever a withdrawal of this kind needs a naira cover, this one did, and Emefiele did nothing about it until he was removed in June. That may be true. It is an argument about what he failed to do, not what he did, and whether it adds up to a case to answer on forgery and obtaining by false pretence is what Justice Muazu now has to decide.

I am not writing this to defend Emefiele. In July the Supreme Court affirmed the forfeiture of seven properties in Ikoyi, Lekki and Agbor, $2,045,000 in cash and a block of shares, on the civil standard I wrote about two weeks ago, as property reasonably suspected to be the proceeds of crime. The 753 duplexes in Abuja went the same way and the federal government has had them since May 2025. His second trial, in Lagos, is still running. If the Abuja charge ends at the no case stage it will be because the prosecution built a $6.23 million forgery case around a man whose signature it never examined, while the people who did sign were suspended and the man who admits keeping $2.5 million of it faced no discipline from the bank.

Which brings me to the part nobody is arguing about. The money is gone. The letter was forged. A man no ministry employs walked out of the central bank with it in cash. This is what has happened to that fact in the three years and eight months since. The trial is about whether Emefiele is guilty. The forfeiture is about whether his houses were suspect. The Auditor General's report on the CBN's 2023 accounts, published in August, found that the bank had not investigated the fraud at its own Abuja branch and could not produce an investigation report. SERAP sued the bank earlier this month, in suit FHC/ABJ/CS/2450/2026, to compel it to account for the $6.23 million and say what it did about it. That is four processes, each with its own question. Not one of them has to answer the one a branch controller in Garki could have answered on February 8, 2023: who sent for this money, and where did it go.

Think about what the money was labelled. Foreign election observers. Seventeen days before the vote. Paid in dollars, in cash, to an encasher nobody employs, on the word of a man who said he came from a special committee in the SGF's office. Nobody has ever suggested that a single observer saw a cent of it. Nobody in three years has publicly asked what $6.23 million in cash was really for in Abuja in the second week of February 2023, and the trial, by its nature, never will, because the charge is about who forged the letter and not about who needed the cash. I wrote three weeks ago about the EFCC warning that stolen money could decide the 2027 election. This is what one withdrawal of it looked like last time, with the vault's own cameras running, and the state has not managed to say who ordered it.

So consider the ruling, whichever way it goes. If the judge finds a case to answer, Emefiele enters his defence and the trial continues into a fourth year over a question the evidence has already answered badly. If he finds none, the one person charged over the vault walks out of it, which on this evidence may be the right outcome, and the file joins the one on the five officers, the one on Alhaji Ahmed, the one on Jubrin Abubakar, the one on Odoh Ocheme, and the one the CBN never opened. None of those files has a date on which anyone must act. I wrote about that last week. It is the same gap, seen from inside the vault.

What would close it is not complicated, and this newsletter has stopped pretending otherwise. A withdrawal from the central bank's vault on forged presidential authority is, before it is anybody's crime, a failure of the bank's own controls, and the bank should have been required to publish what its investigation found, within a fixed time, whatever the EFCC did with the people involved. The Auditor General asked for that report and did not get it. SERAP is now asking a judge to order it. That it takes a civil society lawsuit to make the central bank say whether it looked into its own vault is the most Nigerian sentence I have written in twenty three issues.

Justice Muazu will send for the parties when he is ready. Whatever he rules, $6.23 million will still have left the Garki branch on February 8, 2023, with the cameras on, and the country will still be waiting for someone to say whose money it became.