• UBA's Nigerian home market posted a 1.7 billion naira ($1.1m) pre-tax loss in 2025, against a 364 billion naira profit a year earlier
• A 117 billion naira ($77m) tax credit on accumulated losses kept the home segment in positive net-income territory, masking the operating reversal
• Côte d'Ivoire more than doubled pre-tax profit to 126.6 billion naira ($83m), overtaking Cameroon as UBA's largest African profit contributor

For more than two decades, United Bank for Africa Plc has built its identity as a Nigerian champion, exporting its model across the continent. The audited 2025 accounts that the Lagos-listed lender published last week tell a different story. The Nigerian operation, which still holds 16.4 trillion naira in assets and serves the bank's largest deposit base, swung from a 364 billion naira pre-tax profit in 2024 to a 1.7 billion naira ($1.1 million) loss in 2025 — a reversal disclosed in Note 9 of the audited statements but absent from the press release that accompanied the results. The disclosure is the cleanest evidence yet that the dismantling of post-COVID forbearance is forcing Nigeria's tier-one banks to trade reported earnings for balance-sheet repair, and that UBA's pan-African footprint is no longer a hedge against domestic volatility but the engine that keeps the group profitable.

The tax credit that papered over the loss

The Nigerian segment nonetheless reported a net profit of 115.5 billion naira ($76 million). The arithmetic that bridges the operating loss and the positive net result is the most consequential disclosure of the earnings season: a 117 billion naira ($77 million) tax credit recognised on deferred-tax assets tied to accumulated losses, foreign-exchange revaluations and derivative fair-value adjustments. Without that credit — larger than the entire pre-tax profit of UBA's Cameroon subsidiary — the home market would have closed the year roughly flat to negative on net income as well. The credit is non-recurring by construction. Deferred-tax assets are consumed once recognised, and Nigeria's adoption of the OECD Pillar 2 minimum tax framework, effective January 1, 2026, narrows the runway for credits of this scale, a constraint UBA itself flagged in the report.

The forces that drove the operating reversal are clearer once the segment is broken down. Interest expenses in Nigeria climbed 46 per cent to 666.6 billion naira, reflecting a Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) policy rate that remained at 27.5 per cent for most of the year before a token 50-basis-point cut in September. Loan-loss provisions rose 51 per cent to 305.9 billion naira ($201m) after the CBN, in a circular dated June 13, 2025, terminated all Covid-era forbearance and Single Obligor Limit waivers and required banks to recognise stressed loans they had been allowed to defer. The trading and foreign-exchange line, which had added 322 billion naira to the 2024 group revenue thanks to the naira's devaluation, swung the other way as the currency stabilised between 1,435 and 1,680 per dollar. Three macro shifts collided with one bank.

A francophone West Africa that does the heavy lifting

While the Nigerian engine stalled, a different geography surfaced as the new earnings driver. UBA's nineteen African subsidiaries outside Nigeria delivered 677.3 billion naira ($445 million) in pre-tax profit, up 26 per cent. Within that total, the five subsidiaries inside the West African Economic and Monetary Union — Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Benin, Senegal and Mali — generated 220.7 billion naira ($145 million) combined, a 38.1 per cent jump. The four CEMAC subsidiaries — Cameroon, Chad, Congo Brazzaville and Gabon — went the other way, falling 17 per cent to 151.8 billion naira ($100 million).

The dispersion mirrors the macro story the IMF has been telling for a year. The Fund estimated in December that Côte d'Ivoire grew 6.3 per cent in 2025 with inflation around 1 per cent, the fastest pace in the WAEMU and well within the regional fiscal-deficit ceiling of three per cent of GDP. Cameroon, by contrast, expanded by just 3.1 per cent, according to the IMF's March 2026 Article IV consultation, dragged down by election-related disruptions and a current-account deficit that widened to 3.9 per cent of GDP. The Fund's directors explicitly flagged elevated non-performing loans and a "sovereign-bank nexus" as financial-sector risks for Cameroon — a warning that UBA's Cameroon subsidiary now embodies, having taken a 17.7 billion naira ($12m) impairment charge in 2025, following a 1.7 billion naira reversal a year earlier.

A Côte d'Ivoire boom, not a francophone dividend

The figure that crystallises the rebalancing is Côte d'Ivoire's pre-tax profit: 126.6 billion naira ($83 million), more than double the 57.2 billion naira posted in 2024 and ahead of Cameroon's 61.9 billion naira ($41 million). The Ivorian subsidiary now holds 2.37 trillion naira in assets, the largest among UBA’s foreign markets. Part of the leap reflects a 36 billion naira reversal of provisions taken in earlier years. Still, the underlying trajectory is consistent with the IMF's growth pattern and with the Eurobond-driven recovery in West African sovereign access since 2024.

Yet the francophone story carries a caveat that matters when sizing exposure. Inside the WAEMU bloc, Senegal's pre-tax profit fell 54 per cent, and Mali's collapsed 85 per cent. The bloc's outperformance is therefore less a structural CFA-franc dividend than a Côte d'Ivoire boom set against decline elsewhere. UBA now derives more pre-tax profit from a single Ivorian subsidiary than from its entire CEMAC bloc — a concentration that any investor reading these results should price.

What to watch in 2026

Three signals will determine whether the 2025 results mark a reset or the start of a longer adjustment. The first quarterly disclosure, due in May, will reveal whether the Nigerian segment can post a positive pre-tax result without tax-credit support. The CBN has committed to publishing the names of banks that remain under forbearance restrictions; UBA's status, undisclosed in the audited accounts, will become public during the second quarter. And the IMF's Sixth Review of Côte d'Ivoire's programme, due mid-year, will confirm whether the 6.3 per cent growth pace has held through the post-election political transition. UBA raised 395 billion naira ($260 million) in an oversubscribed September rights issue, lifting its capital base above the CBN's 500 billion naira minimum threshold for internationally licensed banks. The retained earnings accumulating from a francophone subsidiary network growing at 26 per cent will determine how quickly the group can return to a dividend regime similar to the one shareholders have known. For now, the pan-African model is no longer a hedge. It is the business.

Idriss Linge