Open Letter To The IMF

Open Letter · Spring Meetings 2026 · April 13, 2026

An Open Letter to the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund

On the $3.4 Billion COVID Emergency Disbursement to Nigeria, the Conviction of the Accountant General, and the Questions That Remain Unanswered

Dear Managing Director Georgieva,

You are in Washington this week for the Spring Meetings. The agenda covers the global growth outlook, the Middle East shock, and the next wave of IMF emergency financing — which your curtain-raiser speech estimates at $20–50 billion in additional balance-of-payments demand. These are consequential matters. This letter concerns a consequential matter from the last emergency.

In April 2020, the IMF approved its largest single COVID-19 emergency disbursement: $3.4 billion to Nigeria under the Rapid Financing Instrument, disbursed in a single tranche within weeks of the global pandemic declaration. The governance framework applied — commitments by the Nigerian government to publish procurement data, audit reports, and beneficiary information — was described by your own Independent Evaluation Office as “a checklist.”

In 2024, Nigeria’s Accountant General, Ahmed Idris — the senior official responsible for the public accounts through which the $3.4 billion flowed — was convicted by the Federal High Court in Abuja for the systematic misappropriation of public funds. He was sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to forfeit assets worth approximately $80 million.

In April 2025, your Legal Department published Working Paper WP/25/75, Checking the Receipts, documenting that budget losses from fraud and misappropriation in COVID emergency spending were “near-universal” across 50 recipient countries, reaching 20–30 percent in individual cases. Nigeria — the largest single COVID recipient in Sub-Saharan Africa — appears as one line in Appendix 1 of that paper.

Nigeria repaid the $3.4 billion in full, on schedule, between July 2023 and April 2025 — through the most painful phase of its structural adjustment programme, with the naira having lost more than 60 percent of its value against the dollar. The IMF collected its money. The Nigerian people bore the cost of both the adjustment and, on the evidence now available, the losses.

This letter asks five questions. They are not rhetorical. They are requests for information that the IMF is capable of providing and that the public, the Nigerian government, and the international development community are entitled to receive.

Question 1 The IMF’s governance commitments for the Nigeria RFI required the publication of procurement data, audit reports, and beneficiary information. Were these commitments met? If not, what action did the IMF take when they were not? Please provide the specific monitoring record for Nigeria’s RFI governance commitments between April 2020 and the final repayment in April 2025.

Question 2 The Accountant General of Nigeria was convicted in 2024 for the misappropriation of public funds during the period in which the RFI was active. Did the IMF commission or request an independent audit of the $3.4 billion disbursement following the arrest of Ahmed Idris in 2022? If not, why not? If yes, what did it find and why has it not been published?

Question 3 WP/25/75 documents near-universal budget losses in COVID emergency spending across 50 countries. Nigeria — your largest Sub-Saharan African COVID borrower — appears as one line in the appendix, with no country-specific analysis. The IMF’s own evaluators stated that the governance framework was a checklist and that it was applied without the capacity to verify compliance. On the basis of the available evidence — including the Accountant General’s conviction — what is the IMF’s current assessment of the proportion of the $3.4 billion that reached its intended purposes?

Question 4 The IMF mission chief responsible for the Nigeria RFI design and governance framework was subsequently promoted to Assistant Director. What accountability mechanism, if any, applies to IMF staff whose programme governance frameworks are later found to have been inadequate? Does the IMF have a formal process for reviewing programme governance design ex-post when a borrowing country’s senior officials are subsequently convicted of financial crimes?

Question 5 The IMF is this week discussing a further $20–50 billion in emergency financing demand arising from the Middle East shock. The governance framework that will be applied to these disbursements is, in institutional terms, the same framework that was applied in 2020. What specific changes have been made to the IMF’s emergency lending governance architecture since WP/25/75 documented near-universal failures in the COVID deployment? Please provide the specific reforms that have been adopted, with implementation dates.

The Context

This is not a political question. Nigeria is not a case of disputed governance or contested facts. The Accountant General was convicted by a Nigerian court. The IMF’s own Legal Department documented the governance failure. The repayment was made in full. What is missing is accountability — an honest institutional assessment of what went wrong, what proportion of the money reached its intended purposes, and what has changed to prevent it happening again.

The IMF asks sovereign governments to account for every dollar they borrow. The institution should be willing to account for how it governed the largest emergency lending programme in its history.

This letter is published as an open letter. A response — to any or all of the five questions above — will be published in full alongside it on this site. The questions are addressed to your office because you are the Managing Director and you are in Washington this week. They are not intended as an attack on the institution or on you personally. They are the questions that a committed reformer of multilateral finance, who believes these institutions can and must do better, is entitled to ask.

The Spring Meetings are the right venue for this conversation. The shareholders of the IMF — the finance ministers and central bank governors of 190 countries — are in the building. The question of whether the institution that is about to deploy another $20–50 billion in emergency financing has learned from the last emergency is not a small one.

Respectfully,

Parminder Brar

Founder, mdbreform.com

Former World Bank Country Manager and Lead Governance Specialist

April 13, 2026

The full analysis of the IMF’s Nigeria COVID emergency disbursement: How Not to Lend in an Emergency

The Africa-wide analysis of IMF COVID emergency disbursements: Rushing to Disburse — The IMF and COVID-19 in Africa

The full IMF analysis series — governance, ratings, COVID, mandate duplication, and the structural accountability gap: Kofi and the Six Ships

The seven questions for the Spring Meetings: Spring Meetings 2026 Brief

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