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Awka, Nigeria — September 2026
A decade-old dispute between former Anambra State Governor Willie Obiano and his predecessor Peter Obi over what Obi actually left behind at handover has resurfaced this month, after current Commissioner for Finance Izuchukwu Okafor said the Soludo administration is still repaying loans taken out under both the Obi and Obiano eras.
“Peter Obi left ₦9 billion in cash and ₦25.6 billion in bonds and shares in other banks,” Obiano said. “He also issued cheques worth over ₦15 billion before he left, waiting for me to be sworn in before the cheques started appearing.”
Obiano’s account puts total liquid and near-liquid assets inherited from Obi at roughly ₦35 billion — well below the approximately ₦75 billion in cash, local investments, and foreign currency holdings, including Eurobond investments, that Obi has said he left for his successor.
Not a new claim — but a resurfacing one
Obiano’s figures are not new. He first made this claim publicly more than a decade ago, in November 2015 — roughly 18 months after taking over from Obi in March 2014 — when his administration broke its silence and told reporters in Awka that it had inherited just ₦9 billion in cash and ₦26 billion in near-cash assets, alongside contract liabilities it put at ₦185.1 billion, against Obi’s widely circulated claim of a ₦75 billion handover. At the time, Obiano’s camp, through APGA publicity secretary Ifeatu Obiokoye, said it had deliberately stayed quiet for a year and a half “because they wanted peace to reign,” particularly while Obi remained a member of the APGA family, but felt compelled to correct what it called a false public impression. Obi rejected the figures then, as he has again now, accusing Obiano of financial mismanagement and distortion of facts, and pointing out that he had provided certified account statements from the banks holding the funds to Obiano directly at the handover ceremony, in the presence of the banks’ managing directors.
The dispute has now resurfaced because of remarks made this month by Anambra’s current Commissioner for Finance, Izuchukwu Okafor, under the Soludo administration. Speaking on the state government’s Voice of Ndi Anambra podcast, Okafor said the state was still repaying loans taken out under both the Obi and Obiano administrations, and that Obi’s government had left behind inherited debts, including a ₦2 billion ecological loan, unpaid contractor liabilities, and outstanding salaries, gratuities, and pensions. It was Okafor’s comments — not any fresh statement from Obiano himself — that reignited the decade-old figures and pulled them back into current news cycles, with Obiano’s original 2015 numbers being recirculated as commentary on Soludo’s claim.
Obi rejected those claims as “completely false” in a statement posted on X, saying his administration had systematically liquidated more than ₦35 billion in historical gratuities and arrears dating back years before he took office, and that at the point of handover the state owed nothing in salaries, gratuities, pensions, or certified contractor payments. He separately disclosed that ₦2.13 billion in a dedicated ecological fund account at a First Bank branch inside Nnamdi Azikiwe University was left untouched and intact for his successor, despite pressure to spend it before leaving office. “If anybody can establish anything to the contrary, I will stop campaigning,” Obi said.
Obiano’s administration has long rejected Obi’s ₦75 billion figure, and later put Anambra’s inherited liabilities at closer to ₦185 billion when it in turn handed over to Governor Charles Soludo in 2022 — a figure Obi’s camp has also disputed. Official Debt Management Office records show Anambra carried outstanding external debt of about $30.3 million and domestic debt of about ₦3 billion as of December 2013, around the end of Obi’s tenure, though fact-checkers note no single publicly available document conclusively settles the competing cash and savings figures cited by either side.
The financial dispute has now touched all three of Anambra’s most recent administrations: Soludo said upon taking office in 2022 that audited accounts showed more than ₦100 billion in state debt with only ₦300–400 million in cash on hand, and Okafor’s recent remarks placed the current administration’s debt-servicing obligations within that same unresolved chain of claims and counter-claims stretching back to 2014.
