Nigeria's Oil-Marketer Debt to Its Petroleum Regulator Carries Three Different Totals Inside the Same Set of Official Records
The Auditor-General's 2024 report puts NMDPRA's outstanding receivables from oil marketers at about N432bn. A separate, more recent tally for the same group of companies puts it at N327.53bn. The House of Representatives opened a public probe using the higher figure without addressing the N104bn gap between the two.
On 8 September 2026 the Office of the Auditor-General for the Federation released its 2024 Annual Report on Non-Compliance and Internal Control Weaknesses in Ministries, Departments and Agencies. Among its findings: the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority is owed N432,072,557,867.17 in unpaid statutory levies, built mainly from a N431,012,935,018.88 legacy receivable, Bridging Allowance and National Transport Average charges owed by members of two marketer associations, DAPPMAN and MEMAN, plus N9.53bn in unissued legacy promissory notes and N1.06bn in separately tracked arrears from 14 marketers as of January 2025. The debt is described as accumulated between 2017 and 2023. The Auditor-General states that "as at the time of this audit in August 2025, nothing came to the knowledge of the auditors to have changed the position of the amount of the indebtedness." NMDPRA's own management, quoted in the same report, said reconciliation with marketers was "underway," a response the Auditor-General called unsatisfactory.
Two days later, on 8-9 September, the House of Representatives Public Accounts Committee, chaired by Rep. Bamidele Salam, opened an investigation into the debt, citing the N432.07bn figure and summoning NNPCL and the marketer associations to account for it. Coverage across several outlets reproduced that figure consistently as the Auditor-General's number.
What that coverage did not do is set the N432bn figure against a second, more recent number for the same population of debtors. Reporting on NMDPRA's own reconciliation exercise puts the 2025 debt owed by the same 146 companies under DAPPMAN, MEMAN and MOMAN at N327.53bn, about N104.55bn lower than the audited figure being used to launch the probe. Separately, the 2023 Auditor-General report had used a third framing entirely: N392.73bn total, split between NNPCL (N162.46bn) and oil companies (N230.27bn), meaning the oil-marketer share of the debt roughly doubled, on paper, between the 2023 and 2024 audit cycles, even as NNPCL was excluded from the 2024 headline number. Separately, some of the marketers named have told reporters directly that they owe nothing and have already cleared their obligations.
None of this means the debt does not exist, or that the House probe is illegitimate. The Auditor-General's own finding of internal control weaknesses at NMDPRA is exactly the kind of institutional failure that produces inconsistent numbers over time. But that is itself the anomaly worth recording: three non-trivial totals, N230bn, N327.53bn and N432bn, for what is being presented publicly as one unchanged, seven-year-old debt, sitting unaddressed inside the very documents the National Assembly is using to open its inquiry.
This is a live story. The Committee's investigation is ongoing as of the filing date, and the discrepancy has not, as far as could be established, been raised in any public hearing or Committee statement to date.
What this rests on
Cross-read reporting from multiple independent outlets quoting the same Auditor-General figures and the same NMDPRA management quote to the naira and kobo, plus separately reported figures for the 2023 audit cycle and a 2025 reconciliation tally for the same 146 companies. The Auditor-General's own PDF and NMDPRA's registry/tender pages were not independently retrieved.
What this does not establish
The exact source and date of the N327.53bn 146-company figure is unclear from secondary reporting; it may be a partial-recovery figure, a different reporting boundary, or a marketer-association rebuttal rather than an NMDPRA-issued number. Whether any actual debt recovery took place between the audited 2017-2023 legacy total and the lower 2025 figure, which would explain rather than contradict the gap, is not established. No evidence was found that the House Public Accounts Committee has itself acknowledged or addressed this inconsistency in its proceedings. NNPCL's separately audited 2023 share was excluded from the 2024 headline figure; its current status is not addressed in what was retrieved.
What we did ourselves
This report sets three of the government's own totals for the same debt, N230.27bn (2023 audit), N327.53bn (2025 reconciliation) and N432.07bn (2024 audit), side by side. No outlet reviewed had reconciled or even flagged the gap between them, despite all three numbers appearing in public reporting on the same underlying debt.
Sources for this report
(B) Office of the Auditor-General for the Federation, 2024 Annual Report on Non-Compliance and Internal Control Weaknesses in Ministries, Departments and Agencies, released 8 September 2026; House of Representatives Public Accounts Committee proceedings opened 8-9 September 2026.
Confidence: medium. This is our own assessment of whether the event occurred as described, separate from the grade, which describes what kind of thing the claim rests on.
Not obtained: where the underlying document is named above but not linked, we did not hold a copy at the time of publication. We purchase nothing and request nothing in our own name.
Corrections
None on this report. If you find an error, it will be published here, at the same length, with the date it was found, and the original wording will remain visible above it.