The Anambra State Government has said the First Bank account that former Governor Peter Obi named as holding an untouched ₦2.13bn ecological fund is not an ecological account and never carried that sum, escalating a public dispute over the finances he left behind in 2014.
The rebuttal came in a statement by the Commissioner for Information and Value Reformation, Law Mefor, posted on Wednesday, 16 September 2026, through the state’s New Media handle under the title, “Gov Peter Obi and Record of Public Debt in Anambra: Facts Beyond Propaganda and Lies.”
According to Mefor, the government has obtained a certified printout of the account, numbered 2018779464, covering its full history. He said the account is an Internally Generated Revenue Consolidated Revenue Account rather than an ecological fund account, and that from its opening in 2011 to date it has never recorded such an amount as an inflow or a balance. He asked Obi to state where the ₦2.13bn was actually kept.
The exchange began with claims by the state that the Soludo administration is still servicing loans and liabilities inherited from earlier governments, including Obi’s. The Commissioner for Finance, Izuchukwu Okafor, had said on a state podcast that Anambra’s federal allocation was still being deducted to repay inherited loans, even though the current government had not taken fresh commercial bank credit.
Obi rejected those claims in a personally signed statement on Tuesday, 15 September, describing them as completely false. He said his administration cleared historical gratuities and arrears exceeding ₦35bn and handed over a state that owed nothing in salaries, pensions, gratuities or certified contractor payments.
On the ecological fund, Obi said the ₦2bn was released about three months before the end of his tenure to address the Oko/Umuchiana erosion crisis. He said he refused pressure to spend it, insisting it be left for his successor because government is a continuum and the money was tied to a specific project. In his words, the fund was left “100 per cent intact in First Bank, in Account No. 2018779464, with a balance of over ₦2.13 billion.” He challenged anyone to prove otherwise, saying, “If anybody can establish anything to the contrary, I will stop campaigning.”
Mefor’s statement said the certified printout did not support either Obi’s description of the account or the figure he cited. The commissioner did not release the printout publicly alongside the statement, and the document has not been independently examined.
On the broader debt question, Mefor said eight external borrowings remained after Obi left office on 17 March 2014. He put the combined balance of those loans at ₦127.4bn as of 30 June 2026, at the official exchange rate.
The loans he listed are largely multilateral development facilities: the Malaria Control Booster Project, the Third National Fadama Development Project, the Health System Development Project II, the State Education Programme Investment Project, the Community and Social Development Project, the Nigeria Erosion and Watershed Management Project and the Value Chain Development Project. Such facilities are typically long tenor concessional loans serviced through deductions from a state’s federal allocation, which is consistent with the government’s account of continuing repayments.
Mefor also disputed Obi’s position on personnel arrears. He said the Soludo administration cleared about ₦22bn in inherited gratuity arrears but that legacy liabilities from Obi and earlier governments remained, including arrears owed to retired teachers and Water Corporation staff. He said the Water Corporation salary arrears lingered through Obi’s tenure and were settled under Soludo, with two of three instalments already paid.
The commissioner further said Obi’s administration verified and certified 16 months of salary arrears for primary school teachers but paid only five. He also rejected Obi’s claim of leaving more than ₦75bn in savings, asking for records to back the figure. “We will not engage in nebulous creative accounting. If there were ₦75 billion in savings, as claimed, where are the records?” he said. Obi, for his part, has said project tied and reserved funds were not counted in that savings figure.
The dispute carries weight because Obi governed Anambra from 2006 to 2014 and has built much of his national profile on a record of prudent public finance. He was the presidential candidate of the Labour Party in 2023 and now leads the Nigeria Democratic Congress into the 2027 race, having moved from the African Democratic Congress earlier this year.
For now the central facts remain contested. Obi maintains the money was left intact in a dedicated account and has staked his campaign on it. The state government maintains the account was never an ecological fund and never held the sum. Neither the certified bank printout cited by the government nor the savings records referred to by Obi has been placed in the public domain, leaving the claims on both sides unverified.