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Dangote Refinery: Blind Man And His Yam Scrapers [OPINION]

Published

1 year ago

July 30, 2024

By Suyi Ayodele

This blind man trusted no one because he knew the circumstances that led to his blindness. So, he kept on employing servants after servants to help him in his house chores. The blind man loved roast-yam. But he also found faults with his servants over the yam issue. He believed that while scraping the burnt back of the roast-yam, the servants helped themselves to some bits. That was why he fired them frequently, as they came.

One day, however, a vulpine was engaged as the servant of the blind man. Before taking the appointment, the would-be servant asked questions on why nobody stayed so long in the employ of the blind man. The response he got was that there used to be a loss of confidence between the man and his employees over roast-yam. Many people advised the intending servant not to accept the offer. But he had a better idea and a permanent solution to the yam-roasting wahala.

On the first day he would prepare roast-yam for his master, the blind man, as usual, asked the servant to bring the yam close to him so that he would hear the knife as it scraped the yam. The servant did as he was told. When his master asked him to start to scrape the yam, the servant started and then began to whistle. The servant whistled all through the period he scraped the yam, sliced it into bits and placed it before his master. The blind man was happy. A man with yam in his mouth cannot whistle, he noted. The master-servant confidence was built. He retained the servant. However, neighbours and relations noticed that the blind man was dropping in stature while the servant was adding weight by the day. The legend tells us what happened between the scraping of the yam and its slicing. That is a story for another day.

There is an ongoing war between Aliko Dangote and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s government. In the ongoing conflict of confidence between the Dangote Refinery and Federal Government of President Tinubu, the president, I will advise, should take a culture detour and behave like the servant of the proverbial blind man above. Our elders say: when you are scraping the back of a roast-yam for the blind, you are advised to keep whistling so that the blind will know you are not eating the yam.

I have elected to appoint myself into the cabinet of President Tinubu. My ‘friends’ who said I am looking for a job should place congratulatory advertorials in the dailies! Otherwise, they would not share in the ‘largesse’ to come! I hold no grudge against those my ‘friends’. It is the way we are wired in this country. Check out most critics of yesteryear. They now constitute the lead vocalists of the hallelujah orchestra of this government. One of them, who once said he could not stand the possibility “of a drug baron becoming the president of Nigeria”, can drink hemlock for the same figure today! Our life is almost measured in terms of Naira and Kobo! Sad for the polity; sad for our being as a nation! In line with my ‘self-appointed appointment’, you are therefore permitted to salute me as ‘The Honourable Senior Special Adviser, Culture and Tradition’, to the President. Hurray! My first duty in office is on the Dangote Petroleum Refinery and the government of President Tinubu.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: If Tinubu Were Today’s Opposition Leader

Nigerians don’t trust this government. They are right on that! The government itself has not helped matters. There is nothing that this present administration, and the one before it has done to convince the people that they meant well for them. Life has become unbearable for Nigerians in the last nine years. The 16 years of the “cluelessness” of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has paled into insignificance given the pains the All Progressives Congress (APC), which took over government in 2015 has inflicted on the people. It is therefore natural that there would be no confidence between the government and the people.

On any issue, Nigerians have reasons to doubt the sincerity of the government. The Tinubu administration has worsened the situation with its transactional tendencies. Everything the government has done in terms of economic policies, has been largely beneficial to the president and a few of his men! This is why when the conflict of confidence broke out between Dangote Refinery and the government, the public, naturally, moved in support of Dangote. In this present loss of confidence, the people represent the blind man, Dangote Refinery is the roast-yam, and Tinubu’s administration is the servant scraping the back of the roast-yam. The government must whistle, and it will whistle all through. Like we say on the streets: the government go explain tire!

Penultimate week, on this page, I wrote “Supper for Nigeria’s Àkébàjé.” What is playing out between Dangote Refinery, and our Federal Government is the case of an Àkébàjé (spoilt brat) and an unfeeling father. Both parties in the blame game are guilty. Aliko Dangote, the owner of the refinery, has been here for a long time. He is, no doubt, the leader of the class of people known as AGIP (Any Government In Power). His businesses thrive because, like an Àkébàjé, every government pampers him. The Tinubu administration appears to be the only government in our recent history that is not a paddy-paddy government with Dangote. Why it is so, is not our business here, today.

Dangote enjoys what other businessmen in the nation would never get. And he is used to the idea of the government bending backwards to accommodate his numerous demands. Today, Dangote is regarded as the richest African because he survives more on government patronages, rebates and concessions which are detrimental to the economic health of the nation. He cried over the appellation of monopolist he was christened with over the debacle on his refinery and Federal Government represented by the NNPCL. That baffled me. Does it mean that Dangote is not aware that he is the only player in virtually all the ventures he runs in this nation? What about his recent face-off with the BUA Group over the cement issue? Was that not about monopoly? So, is it true that a man with a bad attitude hardly knows how despicable his manners are?

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Supper For Nigeria’s Àkébàjé

For me, I have been praying for a day when a sane government would come and break the chain of Dangote monopoly in this country. However, I must quickly add that the current face-off between the Dangote Refinery and the Federal Government is not what I had wished for. This is simply not the ideal case of breaking someone’s monopoly. The allegations and counter-allegations in the media space are too disturbing. What we are about to witness is a case of what my people call olè gbe, olè gba (a transfer from one thief to the other).

But in all, the Dangote refinery must not go down! I am not saying this because I never suspected that that enterprise is another scam! General Muhammadu Buhari, as the sitting president, ‘commissioned’ the refinery on Monday, May 22, 2023. That was a week to the end of his tenure! He did that à la Kayode Fayemi, who also ‘commissioned’ the Ekiti Airport on October 18, 2022, and left office on October 18, 2022. Almost two years now, not a single butterfly has touched down at the airport. Interestingly, Buhari and Fayemi are ‘progressives’!

Buhari left office as president on May 29, 2023. Seven days to the end of his tenure, the Mai Gaskiya (the honest man) ‘commissioned’ a refinery that a year and two months after, Nigerians are yet to benefit from. That was the first scam, ever, in the Dangote Refinery! Why are we still talking about NNPCL supplying crude to the refinery that was ‘commissioned’ over one year ago? In performing that scam of a ‘commissioning’, President Tinubu, then as president-elect was seated. Five other African countries’ presidents attended the ceremony. Now the reality is here with us. What Buhari commissioned was a mere carcass. The real refinery is now up, but there is no crude oil for it to refine!

Why are we like this as a people? Why would a president ‘commission’ a project that was still under construction? More importantly, why did Buhari ‘commission’ the Dangote refinery when he knew that the crude oil to be refined is not available because he, Buhari, had used the crude oil to borrow money through the numerous forward sale agreements his government executed? The information in the public space is that Buhari executed seven solid forward sale agreements, which entails that he borrowed money and pledged our crude oil as payment. That will run for several years. Nobody has disputed that; nobody is also asking Buhari any question.

Tinubu came and continued with the shenanigan. His government, it was also said, pledged our crude oil as payment for the $3.3 billion Afrexim Bank loan that he took in August 2023, barely three months after he assumed office. The government has not countered that either! Now, if it is true that Dangote needs about 650,000 barrels of crude oil daily to run his refinery, and the NNPCL has just 200,000 barrels of crude oil per day left because Buhari and Tinubu had pawned the remaining 1,050,000 barrels of crude oil in advance, how would the Dangote Refinery get the products to refine? The problem is bigger than that, anyway. Last December, the government Vuvuzelas told us that the Port Harcourt Refinery was almost ready. When eventually that one comes alive, are we going to import crude oil for the refinery?

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Nigeria Nor Be Kenya

When I say Dangote refinery must not die, I mean every alphabet of that statement. President Tinubu has the sole responsibility of ensuring that the crisis is resolved. The emotional blackmail by Aliko Dangote of his willingness to sell his shares of the refinery is very immaterial and ultimately childish. Dangote is crying today because he appears to have no ‘friends’ in this present administration. As we say here in the Niger Delta, na who him mama dey kitchen, nor dey hungry! He should learn that there is no champion for life! Nevertheless, the death of Dangote Refinery, by any means, is a huge negative for this government. As it stands today, I doubt if any serious investor would want to put his money into this economy.

What the government should do, is exactly what the Nigerian Tribune suggested in its Editorial of yesterday, Monday, July 29, 2024, under the title: “The Dangote Refinery Issue.” The Editorial reads in part thus: “To be sure, we do not make light of regulatory issues. Regardless of the acclaimed state of the Dangote Refinery and the position of Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest businessman, in the scheme of things, the law remains the law and ought to be enforced to the letter. The problem is that in this case, there has been no clarity on the actual offence(s) committed by the business in question…. It is a no-brainer that a facility such as the Dangote Refinery, Nigeria’s only functional refinery at the moment, ought not to be trashed by the Nigerian government, particularly given its rhetoric about recovering the Nigerian economy from the current morass…. While we make absolutely no comment about the alleged political underpinnings of the dispute between the Dangote Group and the Federal Government, we are constrained by the lessons of the past to issue a serious warning over the age-long, pernicious practice of destroying local investments and eroding the business climate for partisan reasons.”

The Federal Government should be mindful of the ripple effects of this debacle on its claimed success in attracting foreign investors to our economy. However, the government should not compromise on the standard practice of selling our crude oil to Dangote refinery in Dollars, and not in Naira, as Dangote was said to be asking for. If the Buhari government had given that concession to Dangote as a typical Àkébàjé, the Tinubu government would have my full support if it insisted that it would only sell in dollars. But President Tinubu must be above board in doing that. He must be clean; he must be transparent.

While the Nigerian Tribune Editorial quoted above says it would “make absolutely no comment about the alleged political underpinnings of the dispute between the Dangote Group and the Federal Government”, I am tempted to toe that line. But given my new self-imposed role as an ‘adviser’ in this government, I would like to remind President Tinubu that what is in the public space is that Mr. President is seeking an end of the Dangote Refinery so that his own personal business concerns, and those of his cronies, in that sector, could thrive. True or false, only Tinubu and Dangote know the truth. What should the president do in this circumstance? Let Tinubu continue to whistle while scraping the back of the blind man’s roast-yam. If not for any other thing, but for the sake of thousands of Nigerians who would be thrown back to the labour market should Dangote Refinery die, and the millions of other dependants that will suffer, President Tinubu must show ultimate courage and do everything that is right under the laws to preserve the Dangote refinery. This is the only way any other person would put his money in our economy!

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[OPINION] Jan 1 Resolutions: Why I Write What I Write

Published

1 hour ago

January 4, 2026

Editor

By Festus Adedayo

As I write this, I am listening to a line of the song of my favourite Jamaican reggae music superstar, Peter Tosh. It is a 1979 track entitled Jah Seh No, in his Mystic Man album. When life becomes too convoluted for me to comprehend, when it seems I am running mad, I run into Tosh’s embrace. But, running to Tosh for an embrace is problematic. Tosh himself was like a madman. He was unconventional, an iconoclast who didn’t see life from the prism of the living. A devout adherent of the Rastafari faith, he was highly spiritual, was a poet, philosopher and a staunch defender of African rights. At some point, life broke Tosh’s will, long before his assassination on September 11, 1987, aged 42, in Kingston, Jamaica. It would appear that his musical preachment made little impact. He was repeatedly assaulted by Jamaican police and once had his skull cracked by them. The charge was his illiberal smoking of marijuana. So, in this track, Tosh bore his frustration with orthodoxy and the system thus: “Must Rastas bear this cross alone and all the heathens go free? Must Rastas live in misery and heathens in luxury? Must righteous live in pain and always put to shame? Must they be found guilty and always get the blame?

Tosh’s Jamaica of 1979 bears similarities with today’s Nigeria. Jamaica wore, like an apron, significant economic instability. This led to intense poverty and inequality driven by global economic shocks, domestic policy choices, capital flight, and political violence. The aftermath was massive hopelessness.

The attendant hopelessness in Jamaica fired the muse of reggae musicians. They saw naked poverty as catalysts for their songs. For instance, in 1976, Maxwell Smith, known professionally as Max Romeo & The Upsetters Band, sang in Uptown Babies Don’t Cry, about a little lad hawking Kisko, a popular brand of ice pops, on Kingston streets and shouting “Kisko pops! Kisko pops!”. He also sang about another lad who, as Star newspaper vendor, shouted, “Star News, read the news!”. They were embroiled in existential survival, said Romeo, and “help(ing) mummy pay the fee, for little junior to go to school.” For Tosh, in his Get Up, Stand Up, Jamaicans must stand up for their rights while Bob, apparently frustrated by the system, in Time Will Tell, sang confidently that ”Jah would never give the power to a baldhead to come crucify the dread.”

But the Jamaican governmental and political leadership, epitomised by Edward Seaga and Michael Manley, kept on taking advantage of the people’s hopelessness. Nigeria of today is yesterday’s Jamaican mirror on the wall. The hopelessness in the land has the capacity to break the most impregnable will. Everything seems to be upside down. Seaga and Manley are replicated in Bola Tinubu and Abubakar Atiku. Or Peter Obi and other scavengers for power.

Everything is shrouded in a fog. Hope of retrieval of country from the jaws of political carnivores recedes by the day. This year, prelude to election year, will even be worse. Foes will stab friends and friends will stab foes, not in the back, but in their very before. War has begun, says So-kple-So. That line reminds me of Ghanaian Akan poet, Kojo Senanu’s poem, “My Song Burst” in the A Selection of African Poetry, authored by him and Theo Vincent, which recited that Akan war song.

Physical or psychological repression is writ large. Impunity reigns like a malevolent incubus. Those are actually not the ailment. The disease is the Nigerian people. The way Nigerians’ minds have become warped, significantly captured and compartmentalized into a binary, is mind-boggling. Never have Nigerians’ minds operated in a gross profile as this. Tribe, religion, and political parties determine where everyone stands. No one sees rot and maggots but opportunities. Everyone is running a rat race to take a bite of Nigeria’s carrion. Our sense of judgment has been significantly recalibrated. When I read comments by some otherwise knowledgeable and brilliant people on visible rots in the polity, I feel I am falling into depression. Yet, a part of me warns not to take Nigeria seriously. If you run mad and then die, Nigerians would piss on your graveside.

Many times, I have toyed with the option of abandoning this thankless ritual of column-writing which I began in 1998. It is a killing ritual for which, not only don’t you get paid but you are insulted for daring to have a voice. Maybe I could find sanity in silence and abandonment of my voice? After all, Reno Omokri and Daniel Bwala have found redefinition in becoming the biblical Lot’s wife. But my mind tells me I would face hell on earth and would even not rest in peace. But the truth is, where I stand has potentials of running me mad. Permit me to be immodest, those who know me know I have an ecumenical spirit that cannot hurt a fly. But when I sit behind my laptop, I am like a possessed Yoruba deity of smallpox called Sonpona. Chaos, otherwise known as upside-down, which Fela said has its meaning too, is meaningless to me. Everywhere I turn, I see chaos and my head spins, threatening to explode. Even when I cannot totally extricate myself from the rot in the land, I am grieved like a pallbearer. Yet, another part of me tells me that order and chaos are Siamese, built into a profile by the Omnipotent.

As 2025 spun into oblivion, I stood to make a New Year resolution. But before I did this, I checked the literature of resolutions. It offers no comfort. Over a century ago, specifically on January 1, 1887, Rudyard Kipling, English journalist and novelist, attempted to drill into the philosophy of resolutions. In a timeless poem which explored the human desire to make New Year resolutions and the failure that attends it, he gave a tribe of New Year resolution makers a short-lived hope. He did this in a poem he entitled Little-Known Poem on New Year’s Resolutions. Billions of people in the world make resolutions on New Year’s Day. But, said Kipling, there are trials and tribulations in resolutions. In seven short stanzas, Kipling took readers on a journey. He begins by listing vices he wants to give up. They hung on him like an apparition. Chief among the vices were alcohol, gambling, flirting, and smoking. But in each of the stanzas, as he proposes a resolution, he proposes contrary sentences that nullify the resolutions and even justifying their reversals.

Matthew Wills, in his Why New Years Falls on January 1st: Why do we celebrate the beginning of the New Year on the first of January?, took the world on a journey on the frivolities of January 1st. Julius Caesar, he said, is why. The eponymous Julian calendar, said Matthew, began in Mensis Ianuarius (or Januarius) 45B.C. The month of January, he further reminded us, is named after the Roman god called Janus. Janus is a god who had two faces. While one faces the future, the other faces the past. Janus was however perceived, according to Wills, as “the god of beginnings, endings, and transitions, or, more prosaically, doors and passageways.”

Among the Yoruba, just like Jews’, the agricultural season marks the beginning of the year. For them, the newness of a year is defined by their philosophy of time, which they also approximated in the saying, the next season is here so, don’t eat your yam seedling, «Àmódún ò jìnnà, má jẹ isu èèbù rẹ». Season and time, to the Yoruba, are expressed in an embodiment of words like àkόkὸ (time around), ìgbà (season) and àsìkò (specific season) which they most times deploy interchangeably. The people also have sayings which speak to their conception of time. For instance, late professor of philosophy and my teacher at the University of Lagos, Sophie Oluwole, in one of her works, “The Labyrinth Conception of Time as Basis of Yoruba View of Development” published in Studies in Intercultural Philosophy (1997), cited Yoruba saying to illustrate this. “Tí wón bá ńpa òní, kí òla tèlé won kí ó lo wò bí won o ti sin ín (when today is being killed, tomorrow’s attendance at the murder scene is necessary so that it could see where the corpse of today is buried and for it to know how it too would be interred). The two other Yoruba sayings Oluwole cited to illustrate time and season are, one: “ogbón odún ni, wèrè èèmí ni” (this year’s wisdom is next year’s folly) and “Ìgbà ò lo bí òréré, ayé ò lo bí òpá ìbon” (a life span cannot exist ad infinitum; it is not vertical, and is unlike the straightness of the barrel of a gun).

These were all I reflected upon as I proposed to make a 2026 Resolution. The self-imposed road of a columnist I tread is a lonely, hard road strewn with briers and thorns. I remember the sermon of another Jamaican reggae great, Jimmy Cliff. It is a hard road to travel and a rough road to walk, he counseled. Many times, you are lonely, dejected and rejected on this road. You open your mouth to speak but wordless words ooze therefrom. Just as Tosh lamented in his “Must Rastas bear this cross alone and all the heathens go free?” volunteering anti-establishment opinion is like carrying a cross. Many times, I am inundated by family and friends to turn apostate of my belief. They fear death or state castration. Can’t the world see? Don’t they see the pains, grits and uncertainty on this road? Don’t they know that there is lushness, flourish and plenty on the other side? If I neglected these for a carapace-hard travel, I thought I would be hailed. No. Why is one who chose this lonely road the demon? And those who sup in the bowl of destruction heroes? Why? No response. Only echo of my own silent voice.

In this dejection, Audre Geraldine Lorde came to my rescue. Lorde was an American professor, philosopher, feminist, poet and rights activist. She was also a self-described Black lesbian. Lorde got romantically involved with Mildred Thompson, American sculptor, painter and lesbian she met in Nigeria during FESTAC 77. In a paper she delivered at the Modern Language Association›s “Lesbian and Literature Panel,” Chicago, Illinois, December 28, 1977 with the title, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, Lorde gave insight into the pains she encountered on account of her beliefs: “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”

It could also mean pain or death, but she said, “learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength” and that “I was going to die, if not sooner, then later, whether or not I had ever spoken.” Gradually, said Lorde, “I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, my silences had not protected me.” She died of liver cancer in 1995.

Yes, this is a rough, lonely road. It could be excruciating when you see friends, especially ones in government, desert you because they don’t want to associate with you. You walk alone like a deranged alchemist. Some even ask why, with your endowment and ascription, you live comparatively like a pauper. Your views are criminalized. Where you stand is not popular. But both madman Peter Tosh and lesbian Audre Geraldine Lorde give the will to trudge on in the New Year, regardless. Lorde was loud in my head with her admonition. After her initial apprehension of a mastectomy resulting from a breast cancer, she said: “I was going to die, sooner or later… My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear.”

There and then, I made a bold vow, a New Year resolution: I will continue to speak truth to power. Regardless.

News

What I Saw After A Lady Undressed Herself — Pastor Adeboye

Published

3 hours ago

January 4, 2026

Editor

General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Pastor Enoch Adeboye, has recounted a remarkable experience in which he said a woman was miraculously healed after prayers.

Adeboye shared the testimony while speaking at the RCCG annual gathering, describing the incident as a clear demonstration of divine intervention and the power of prayer.

According to the cleric, the incident occurred during a visit to a city where he had checked into an undisclosed hotel.

He said the lady approached him, greeted him and insisted on following him to his hotel room despite his objections.

“I told her, ‘Please don’t put me into trouble, I can pray for you here,’ but she insisted on following me,” Adeboye recounted.

He said that upon getting to the hotel room, the woman revealed the condition that prompted her persistence.

“When she pulled her dress up, what I saw shocked me. Her body was covered with scars,” he said.

Adeboye explained that he immediately began to pray for the woman, adding that he did not mind being loud during the prayers.

“I began to pray for her, and before I knew it, all the scars were gone,” he said.

The RCCG leader described the experience as a powerful testimony of faith, stressing that it reinforced his belief in prayer as a tool for healing and transformation.

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Missing N128bn: SERAP Demands Probe Into Power Ministry, NBET Expenditures

Published

4 hours ago

January 4, 2026

Editor

The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has urged President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to immediately order an investigation into allegations that more than N128 billion in public funds is missing or has been diverted from the Federal Ministry of Power and the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Plc. (NBET), Abuja.

The allegations are contained in the latest annual report of the Auditor-General of the Federation, published on September 9, 2025, which highlighted multiple cases of financial irregularities, undocumented payments, ents and suspected diversion of public funds across both institutions.

In a letter dated January 3, 2026, and signed by SERAP’s Deputy Director, Kolawole Oluwadare, the organisation called on President Tinubu to direct the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, alongside relevant anti-corruption agencies, to promptly probe the findings and ensure accountability.

SERAP stressed that any individual found culpable should be prosecuted where sufficient admissible evidence exists, while all missing or diverted funds should be fully recovered and paid back into the national treasury.

The group further urged the president to deploy any recovered funds to address the deficit in the 2026 budget and help ease Nigeria’s growing debt burden.

According to SERAP, Nigerians continue to bear the consequences of entrenched corruption in the power sector, which has contributed to persistent electricity shortages, frequent transmission line failures and unreliable power supply nationwide.

The organisation argued that addressing corruption in the sector would significantly improve access to regular and uninterrupted electricity.

The civil society group described the allegations as a grave breach of public trust and a violation of the 1999 Constitution (as amended), Nigeria’s anti-corruption laws and international obligations, including the United Nations Convention against Corruption.

Detailing the audit findings, SERAP noted that the Ministry of Power failed to account for over N4.4 billion transferred to the Mambilla, Zungeru and Kashimbilla project accounts, with no evidence provided on how the funds were utilised.

The Auditor-General expressed fears that the money may have been diverted and recommended its recovery.

The report also revealed that the ministry paid over N95 billion to contractors for various projects without documentation or proof that the projects existed or were executed.

Additionally, more than N33 million was reportedly spent on foreign travels for the minister and aides to attend international events in Abu Dhabi and Dubai without required approvals from the Secretary to the Government of the Federation or the Head of Civil Service.

Further concerns were raised over unaccounted expenditures, including over N230 million on the GIGMIS platform and more than N282 million paid as non-personal advances to staff beyond statutory limits, all without adequate documentation.

At NBET, the Auditor-General uncovered multiple cases of irregular contract awards and payments. These include over N427 million in contracts awarded without evidence of procurement advertisements, more than N7.6 billion transferred into purported sub-accounts of unnamed beneficiaries, and over N9.3 billion paid to Egbin Power Plc without documents to authenticate the transactions.

The audit also cited payments exceeding N8 billion made without proper record-keeping, over N420 million paid to ineligible consultants without evidence of services rendered, and more than N1.1 billion spent as extra-budgetary expenditure without approval from the Minister of Finance or the National Assembly.

Other questionable expenditures highlighted include payments for vehicles without due process, unapproved legal fees, undocumented staff welfare packages, and consultancy services not captured in approved budgets.

SERAP warned that if decisive action is not taken within seven days of the receipt or publication of its letter, the organisation would consider legal steps to compel the government to act in the public interest.

Citing constitutional provisions, SERAP reminded President Tinubu that Section 15(5) of the Constitution mandates the abolition of corrupt practices, while Section 16 obliges the government to ensure that the nation’s resources are managed to promote the welfare and happiness of all citizens.