CBN Reforms Are Laying New Tracks for Nigeria’s Next Economy

For three years, analysts have watched Olayemi Cardoso’s Central Bank of Nigeria reforms with scrutiny and measured optimism. The debate has focused not only on whether the bank can restore transparency and accountability, but also on whether criticism has sometimes turned conjecture into alleged fact.

Recent commentary on the CBN’s 2025 financial statements illustrates the dispute. The statements and the joint auditor’s report say that the CBN Financial Reporting Manual applied from Jan. 1, 2025, replacing the IFRS-based framework used the previous year. The change means the year-on-year figures cannot be compared directly. The auditors issued an unmodified opinion, while adding an emphasis of matter connected to Section 38 of the CBN Act.

Those disclosures appear in the record through the CBN’s external auditors. The article says that a change in reporting basis, an emphasis of matter and the limited disclosures in summary accounts are standard features of abridged central-bank reporting while the full audited report is pending. They warrant technical examination, but do not by themselves prove deception. Where accounting treatments are challenged, the article argues, the proper response is a like-for-like reconciliation rather than an assumption of bad faith.

The wider reform record, it says, should be judged through policy decisions, governance changes and measurable effects. Before Cardoso, businesses operated in a volatile system marked by multiple foreign-exchange windows, parallel-market arbitrage and ad hoc interventions. The article presents the past three years as a move away from that emergency model toward a permanent framework. Among the measures it identifies are a 26.5 percent benchmark rate maintained by the Monetary Policy Committee and headline inflation of 15.43 percent, which it says has restored a more predictable basis for multi-year planning. It also points to the CBN’s retreat from direct developmental lending, including the Anchor Borrowers programme.