An investigation into the Central Bank of Nigeria’s Anchor Borrowers’ Programme, the farmers who supposedly received billions, the money that remains unrecovered, and the regulatory questions that Nigeria can no longer afford to ignore
Nigeria's Anchor Borrowers' Programme was supposed to be one of the country's most ambitious attempts to transform agriculture.
Launched by the Central Bank of Nigeria in 2015, the programme was designed to connect smallholder farmers with financing, agricultural inputs and commodity buyers. Its objectives included increasing agricultural production, improving farmers' incomes, reducing food imports and creating a sustainable financing ecosystem between farmers and processors.
Instead, years later, the programme has become the subject of a much darker question:
Where did hundreds of billions of naira actually go?
A recent Auditor-General's report has raised one of the most troubling findings yet: the CBN allegedly failed to recover ₦629.04 billion under the Anchor Borrowers' Programme that had been paid to “unknown beneficiaries.” The beneficiaries could not be satisfactorily identified, according to the audit finding reported in November 2025.
That single phrase—unknown beneficiaries—should stop Nigerians in their tracks.
Because this is not simply a story about farmers failing to repay loans.
It is a story about whether the Nigerian state can identify the people to whom it gave hundreds of billions of naira.
And if it cannot, then the country has a much bigger problem than agricultural loan defaults.
The programme was enormous
The scale of the Anchor Borrowers' Programme was extraordinary.
By March 2023, the CBN said it had disbursed approximately ₦1.09 trillion under the programme to more than 4.6 million smallholder farmers, covering 21 agricultural commodities and about 6.02 million hectares of farmland.
Earlier CBN figures had put the number of beneficiaries at roughly 4.5 million, with millions of hectares supposedly cultivated through the programme.
The programme therefore represents one of the largest agricultural-financing experiments in Nigerian history.
But the bigger the programme, the bigger the accountability obligation.
If the government claims to have financed millions of farmers with more than a trillion naira, it should be possible to establish—farmer by farmer, account by account, farm by farm—where the money went.
There should be a digital trail.
There should be bank records.
There should be beneficiary identification.
There should be agricultural records.
There should be repayment records.
There should be evidence of farms.
There should be evidence of inputs.
There should be evidence of harvests.
There should be evidence of the commodity produced.
And there should be evidence that the person receiving the money actually existed as the farmer the programme claimed to support.
Then came the ₦629 billion bombshell
The Auditor-General's finding changes the nature of the story.
According to reporting on the audit, ₦629.04 billion under the Anchor Borrowers' Programme was paid to beneficiaries whose identities could not be established, and the money had not been recovered. The Auditor-General reportedly expressed concern that the funds may have been diverted.
That does not legally establish that the CBN stole ₦629 billion.
That distinction is critical.
An audit finding is not a criminal conviction.
“Unrecovered” is not automatically synonymous with “stolen.”
And “unknown beneficiaries” does not automatically mean “fake farmers.”
But it creates a question that the CBN must answer:
Who received the money?
If they were genuine farmers, identify them.
If they were legitimate borrowers who defaulted, show the loan records.
If they received agricultural inputs rather than cash, show the delivery records.
If participating banks or anchor companies received the funds, identify them.
If the money was diverted, establish where it went.
But ₦629 billion cannot simply disappear into the phrase “farmers.”
The “fake farmers” question is not new
The controversy over supposed ghost or non-farmer beneficiaries did not suddenly emerge with the Auditor-General's report.
Farmer organisations had previously raised concerns about the integrity of the programme's beneficiary lists.
In 2022, the All Farmers Association of Nigeria alleged that fake farmers were benefiting from the Anchor Borrowers' Programme. The CBN rejected the allegation and challenged the association to provide evidence.
That dispute is important because it demonstrates that concerns over beneficiary verification existed while the programme was still operating at enormous scale.
The question now is whether those earlier concerns were merely political accusations—or whether they point toward the much larger accountability problem identified by the Auditor-General.
That can only be established through forensic verification.
How could a “ghost farmer” system work?
The mechanics are disturbingly simple.
Imagine that a government announces financing for 100,000 smallholder farmers.
A list is compiled.
Names are submitted.
Bank accounts are linked.
Loans are recorded.
Inputs are supposedly distributed.
On paper, 100,000 farmers have been supported.
But what if 5,000 names represent people who never received anything?
What if some beneficiaries are duplicated?
What if some are politically connected individuals who are not farmers?
What if some farmers exist but never received the amount attributed to them?
What if an intermediary receives funds intended for farmers?
What if an anchor company reports agricultural activity that never occurred?
The paperwork can make a failed or fraudulent transaction look legitimate.
That is why beneficiary verification is so important.
And the CBN itself designed the Anchor Borrowers' Programme around mechanisms intended to connect identifiable smallholder farmers with financial institutions and agricultural anchors.
The existence of those controls makes the Auditor-General's finding even more uncomfortable.
Where was the verification?
If millions of farmers received financing, there should be multiple independent ways to verify them.
A serious forensic audit could cross-reference:
Name → BVN → NIN → bank account → location → farm → farm size → commodity → input delivery → harvest → repayment.
A genuine farmer should leave a trail.
A ghost farmer should not.
This is where technology becomes important.
Nigeria already possesses enormous quantities of digital identity and banking information.
A national forensic exercise could sample beneficiaries and establish whether:
- the beneficiary exists;
- the BVN belongs to that person;
- the NIN corresponds to the same person;
- the account actually received the money;
- the farmer actually cultivated the reported land;
- the reported farm exists;
- the claimed agricultural activity occurred;
- the farmer received the inputs;
- and whether any repayment was made.
If those records cannot be reconciled, then the problem is no longer simply poor administration.
It becomes evidence of potentially systemic fraud.
But there is another explanation: ordinary loan failure
There is an important alternative explanation that must not be ignored.
Some farmers may have been genuine.
They may simply have failed to repay.
And there is substantial evidence that the programme suffered severe repayment problems.
By 2023, reports put unpaid Anchor Borrowers' loans at hundreds of billions of naira. BusinessDay reported that farmers had defaulted on approximately ₦518 billion of financing.
The Guardian previously reported that the IMF had estimated that only about 24 percent of amounts disbursed had been repaid, while the CBN disputed that figure and said it had recovered approximately 52.4 percent, or about ₦503 billion, from its reported beneficiaries.
This matters.
A farmer can be completely genuine and still default.
Floods can destroy crops.
Insecurity can prevent harvesting.
Input prices can rise.
Commodity prices can collapse.
An anchor company can fail to purchase produce.
Farmers can divert inputs.
And poorly designed credit systems can produce disastrous recovery rates.
Therefore, a ₦629 billion recovery problem does not automatically equal ₦629 billion stolen.
But that still leaves the “unknown beneficiaries” issue.
A genuine defaulting farmer should be identifiable.
The distinction that Nigeria must make
There are at least four possible scenarios.
Scenario One: Genuine farmers, genuine loans
The money went to real farmers.
They failed to repay.
That would be a major policy and credit-management failure, but not necessarily corruption.
Scenario Two: Genuine farmers, but administrative failure
The beneficiaries existed, but the CBN and participating institutions failed to maintain adequate documentation.
That would represent an enormous governance and internal-control failure.
Scenario Three: Ghost or fictitious beneficiaries
Some people listed as beneficiaries did not actually receive the funds—or did not exist in the agricultural capacity claimed.
That could indicate fraud.
Scenario Four: Deliberate diversion
Funds were deliberately channelled away from their intended beneficiaries through officials, intermediaries, banks, anchors, politically connected individuals or companies.
That would potentially constitute a major corruption case.
The purpose of an investigation is to establish which of these occurred, and in what proportion.
The CBN's own architecture creates an accountability trail
This is perhaps the most important investigative point.
The Anchor Borrowers' Programme was not supposed to be a system in which the CBN simply handed out cash to anonymous farmers.
The programme was structured around an ecosystem linking smallholder farmers, financial institutions and agricultural anchors.
The CBN has also reported that the programme operated through participating financial institutions.
That means responsibility did not necessarily rest with the CBN alone.
If something went wrong, investigators need to identify where the money passed through before reaching the alleged farmer.
Was it:
CBN → bank → anchor → farmer?
Or another structure?
That question is crucial because it identifies where controls could have failed.
The banks cannot simply disappear from the investigation
If billions passed through participating financial institutions, those institutions should possess transaction records.
Investigators should therefore examine:
- account-opening documents;
- BVN records;
- NIN records where applicable;
- transaction histories;
- loan agreements;
- disbursement dates;
- account balances;
- cash withdrawals;
- transfers to third parties;
- repayment records;
- and links between beneficiary accounts.
The objective should be to reconstruct the money trail.
If ₦10 million supposedly went to ten farmers, investigators should be able to demonstrate the movement of that ₦10 million.
If it moved somewhere else, the next question is:
Why?
The political question
The Anchor Borrowers' Programme was created under former CBN governor Godwin Emefiele and became one of the defining intervention programmes of the Buhari-era central bank.
By 2023, the CBN itself was reporting more than ₦1 trillion in cumulative disbursements.
The House of Representatives has subsequently investigated the programme, with lawmakers probing approximately ₦1.12 trillion in disbursements.
In April 2026, the House expanded its investigation and summoned additional institutions over alleged implementation gaps.
This means the controversy has outlived the administration that created the programme.
It is now a Nigerian institutional problem.
And that is precisely how it should be treated.
SERAP has taken the matter to court
The scandal has now moved beyond parliamentary and media scrutiny.
The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project has sued the CBN over alleged failures involving approximately ₦3 trillion in public funds, with the ₦629.04 billion Anchor Borrowers' finding forming one of the central allegations.
That is significant.
It means the question is no longer merely:
“What are journalists saying about the CBN?”
It has become:
“Can the CBN account for public money identified by the country's audit system as unaccounted for or unrecovered?”
That is a fundamentally different question.
Why “the CBN is stealing” is still too early
There is a temptation in Nigerian political discourse to jump directly from an audit query to a declaration of theft.
That is dangerous.
It can undermine legitimate investigations.
It can also allow officials to dismiss an otherwise serious scandal as political propaganda.
The evidence currently supports a much more defensible conclusion:
There are serious, documented accountability failures surrounding the Anchor Borrowers' Programme, including an Auditor-General finding concerning ₦629.04 billion paid to unknown beneficiaries and not recovered.
That is already extraordinary.
There is no need to exaggerate it.
The evidence is powerful enough.
What should investigators do?
Nigeria should stop arguing about the scandal and follow the data.
The CBN should release, subject to legitimate privacy protections, an independently auditable aggregate beneficiary database.
Investigators should obtain the complete underlying records.
Then conduct a forensic reconciliation.
For every sampled beneficiary:
1. Verify identity.
2. Verify bank account.
3. Verify disbursement.
4. Verify farm location.
5. Verify farm size.
6. Verify commodity.
7. Verify agricultural inputs.
8. Verify harvest or off-take.
9. Verify repayment.
10. Trace any onward transfers.
If thousands of supposed farmers cannot be found, the investigation should move immediately to identifying who created the beneficiary records.
If farmers are real but never received the money attributed to them, follow the money.
If banks transferred funds to intermediaries, identify those intermediaries.
If anchors received money but failed to deliver inputs or purchase produce, investigate the anchors.
If politicians or public officials benefited, prosecute where the evidence supports it.
And if the CBN itself failed through negligence rather than deliberate misconduct, those responsible should still face accountability.
The food-security irony
There is perhaps no more painful irony in this entire scandal.
The Anchor Borrowers' Programme was designed partly to reduce Nigeria's dependence on imported food and strengthen domestic production.
Yet Nigeria subsequently experienced a severe food-price crisis.
That does not mean the programme caused the food crisis.
Food inflation has multiple causes, including insecurity, logistics, exchange-rate movements, energy costs, climate shocks and structural weaknesses in agriculture.
But it raises a legitimate question:
What did Nigeria get for more than ₦1 trillion of agricultural intervention spending?
If the programme financed millions of genuine productive farmers, where are the productivity gains?
If farmers received financing but failed because the agricultural value chain was broken, why was the programme designed that way?
If hundreds of billions went to unidentified beneficiaries, who benefited?
The answers matter because Nigeria cannot afford to repeat the experiment blindly.
The bigger scandal may not be the money
The biggest danger is not merely that billions may have been lost.
It is that Nigerians may lose faith in government intervention altogether.
Imagine being a genuine smallholder farmer who never received the promised support.
Then you hear that government says millions of farmers benefited.
Then an audit says hundreds of billions went to beneficiaries who cannot be identified.
The message to that farmer is devastating:
Someone received the money. Just apparently not you.
That is how public trust collapses.
The ₦629 billion question
Ultimately, the entire controversy can be reduced to one question:
Show us the farmers.
Not political slogans.
Not press releases.
Not photographs of rice pyramids.
Not aggregate beneficiary numbers.
Not speeches about food security.
Show the underlying records.
Show that the people who received the money existed.
Show that they were farmers.
Show that they received the funds.
Show what they produced.
Show what they repaid.
And where the money cannot be traced, tell Nigerians exactly why.
Until that happens, nobody should casually declare that the CBN stole ₦629 billion.
But neither should anybody dismiss the matter as ordinary loan defaults.
A government financial institution cannot reasonably administer more than a trillion naira in agricultural interventions and then leave hundreds of billions associated with “unknown beneficiaries” hanging in the accounts of history.
The Auditor-General has raised the alarm.
The House of Representatives has investigated the programme.
Civil-society organisations have taken the issue to court.
The CBN now has an opportunity to do something simple:
open the books.
If the farmers were real, the data should prove it.
If the money was legitimately disbursed, the records should prove it.
If the farmers defaulted, the loan files should prove it.
If intermediaries diverted the funds, the banking trail should expose them.
And if ghost farmers were used to siphon public money, a proper forensic investigation should reveal who created them, who approved them, who received the money and who ultimately benefited.
That is the investigation Nigeria needs.
Because the question is no longer whether the Anchor Borrowers' Programme was a good idea.
The question is whether ₦1 trillion-plus of public intervention money can be accounted for down to the last legitimate beneficiary.
And after the Auditor-General's ₦629.04 billion finding, Nigeria has every right to demand an answer.
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