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OPINION: Betsy, Oshiomhole And Swine Fight

Published

1 year ago

September 3, 2024

By Suyi Ayodele

The Benin people have long ago embraced the concept of ogieriakhi, which holds that an elder does not revenge an insult. This native wisdom is to ensure that the elders, who are the pillars holding the community, don’t engage in anything that would make anyone question their wisdom. The Oba of Benin is one of the most respected monarchs in the country. His subjects treat him like a deity. If for instance, the Omo N’Oba is annoyed by an act of anyone, he is expected to maintain his stoic disposition. He cannot betray emotions in the public; he cannot lose his cool before mere mortals. He has those who avenge insults for him. The best he could do, if provoked, it to make the traditional pronouncement, evbin ni tai mayewe, ya riukoror, which means, if you don’t like what I say, go and hang yourself. That is a command from the throne. The one so commanded must carry out the instruction. But that rarely happens. In the last two centuries, or so, there is no record to show that an Omo N’Oba made such a pronouncement. That is the dignity of the throne, which translates to the dignity, wisdom and maturity of the elders.

But Edo appears to have lost that in recent times. Elders no longer behave as elders. What used to be commonplace among guttersnipes is what grey hairs now do. My mind raced to the recent outburst by Comrade Adams Oshiomhole against the first lady of Edo State, Mrs. Betsy Obaseki. Madam Betsy had, while campaigning for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate in the forthcoming gubernatorial election in the state, Asue Ighodalo, among some women in Ubiaja, urged the womenfolk to vote for a candidate who has a wife, positing that he would appreciate women and give them more recognition. She then quipped that of all the candidates in the race, only the PDP candidate “has a wife”. Here is how she put it:

“Let’s campaign and vote for the best candidate in this forthcoming election. I want to introduce his wife. Incidentally, out of all the candidates contesting this election, only one has a wife. That is our own party candidate, Asue Ighodalo. This is his wife, Ifeyinwa Ighodalo.” Hardly had she dropped the microphone, when Oshiomhole reacted. And he was brutal in his reaction. The former National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), took Madam Besty’s comment to mean a reference to the APC candidate, Senator Monday Okpebholo. The Comrade’s outburst was egregious! Hear him:

“I was shocked yesterday to see Mrs. Obaseki, the first lady, saying that our candidate has no wife. I’m sorry she had to say that because here is a woman who has no child. Between him (sic) and Obaseki, they are childless. They are not even ready to adopt. I don’t blame anybody who doesn’t have a child but people who have love for children go to a motherless home and adopt. They have not adopted. They are both in their sixties. So, your marriage, I don’t know whether it is a contract one or whatever it is, but they have no child….” Both parties missed the point. But in my own judgement, Oshiomhole’s response was the most infelicitous! I will explain.

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Marriage is a permissible will of God. We all make choices. And like our elders say, marriage is like a market that is set up in darkness (ojà òkùnkùn), it is only when the light shines that one knows what one has bought. Some are lucky to get good partners. Many are not that lucky. However, individuals have control over what they make of their marriages. Sustaining a home requires a lot of things: temperance, accommodation, wisdom, love and many more. If a man married two wives and threw the two of them away, we should look at his character alongside those of the two women. A man who says every firewood in his cooking spot brings out smoke instead of flame should be studied very well before a higher responsibility is added to him. Most good managers of homes are likely to be good managers of a collective destiny. That is what I think Madam Betsy alluded to.

Even at that, a simple stylistic study of her statements at the campaign rally shows that she is a better student of communication. She mentioned no names. She mentioned no political parties. That is what my Stylistics teachers called “Avoidance Strategy”, a principle that allows the communicator to extricate himself from the web of controversy. I still don’t get how Oshiomhole equates “Incidentally, out of all the candidates contesting this election, only one has a wife”, to require an indecorous response deriding the childlessness of a couple! The only explanation that is close to the equation is the saying of our elders that when dry bone is mentioned in a proverb, the old woman thinks that she is being referred to.

If, for instance, Madam Betsy had mentioned Okpebholo’s marital condition, knowing that the man lost his wife or wives to the cold hands of death, she would have stood condemned before God and man. But is that the case here? No. Okpebholo’s two wives are alive but might not be under his roof. That also does not mean it is right for Madam Besty or anyone else to deride another on account of a failed marriage. We all do our best to keep our homes going. If her jab is to say that those who threw away two women in quick succession, or those who could not sustain a marriage for just one year have no business running a state, since charity begins at home, she might be making a seemingly valid argument except that nobody knows the circumstances surrounding those failed relationships. Honestly, our politics has not grown beyond banal issues. That is sad enough.

Childlessness in a marriage, on the other hand, is beyond any mortal. Every man or woman desires to procreate. If it doesn’t happen, it becomes a problem. And it is not a problem anyone should use as a point of attack. That will be most the stone-hearted to do. Africans have different euphemisms to describe a woman who suffers such a fate. In my Yoruba environment, we don’t just call a woman barren. We call her Ìyá olómo púpò (the woman with many children). If, during an interrogation, you ask a woman without a child the number of her children, her response will be Omo pò lówó mi (I have numerous children). You don’t mock a woman with her childlessness. We use “àpón” to abuse someone, especially a man who is of age but refuses to marry, but not “àgàn” (barrenness).

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It is also not in the place of Oshiomhole to say that couples in their 60s who don’t have a child must adopt. Comrade as a Christian must have been told in his Catholic Catechism that Abraham and Sarah did not have Isaac until they were 100 and 90 years. Isaac had to beg God for Rebecca to have Esau and Jacob. Jacob’s favourite wife, Racheal waited on the Lord for long before she had children for Jacob. In our African Traditional Religion (ATR), Ifa, in Ogbè Òyèkú, tells us the Lapetun, the mother of Adan (Bat), waited for so long before she had her only child, Adan. Incidentally, Adan is our traditional symbol of fertility because if one opens the bowel of a Bat, one finds another Bat inside, and if that one is opened, another Bat is also found. This is why a good Babalowo prays for the woman trusting Eledua for a child thus: àtolè dolè ni ti Àdán, bí wón bá yèdí re wò omo ni (from foetus to foetus is the lot of the Bat; if they open your bosom, it is a child they will see).

I don’t know if Oshiomhole plays our local game, Ayo, the 48-seed game of 24 seeds in each row. Those who play that game very well are not known to have the capacity to keep secrets. If you want to know the latest gist in town, just go over to an Ayo spot. There, nothing is hidden. The beauty of it is that nobody takes any offence even when the topmost secret is laid bare in the public. Our elders warn those who have something to hide not to participate in Ayo game. They say àsírí ò bò lénu aláyò (Ayo players do not keep secrets). That is what Oshiomhole did when in the video, he alluded to the relationship between Betsy and Godwin Obaseki being a “contract” marriage.

If Oshiomhole had limited his tirades to his allusion that whatever marriage arrangement between Madam Besty and her husband, Godwin Obaseki, is merely contractual, one would have understood, though that is also belittling of his status in the society. This is also why Mrs. Obaseki should have known that anyone living in a glass house should learn not to throw stones. Oshiomhole, no doubt, knows, more than any other person, how the Obaseki couple came to be before the 2016 governorship election that produced the Governor Obaseki. The lesson here is that there is little or no difference between a contractual or cosmetic marriage and a failed one. In our culture, a cosmetic marriage is never the template given to would-be couples. We had a case in the early 90s, when a Military Governor (MILAD) of one of the states in the South-West drove out of the Government House in one vehicle, and his glamorous wife in a separate vehicle, when the MILAD’s tour of duty ended. To date, nobody has seen the duo together in any public function. Ironically, the ex-military man, now old, postulates on virtually every public policy. Whoever midwifed the “contract marriage” Oshiomhole mentioned is as good as the ‘contractual’ couple!

If Oshiomhole knows anything about the “contract” marriage between the Edo State first family, and he is bringing that to the public because of politics, it tells more about his personality. There should be decency in one’s utterances, especially at that age. Our elders are not wrong when they say an elder talks more in his stomach than in his mouth (inú ni àgbà ńyá, àgbà kìí yá enu). How many other ‘secrets’ does Oshiomhole know? How many will he reveal whenever he is provoked? I used to think that they say age and wisdom are siblings. Why do we have the contrary now?

Mrs. Obaseki on her part should know that marriages break down for several reasons, and it is a worthy credit for those who navigate the odds and keep their marriages. However, asking Edo voters, especially the women, to put into consideration the ability of any of the candidates to manage his home before entrusting the entire state to him is not entirely out of place. It takes a lot to run and sustain a marriage. This however does not approve the tendency of any man to change wives the way a nursing mother changes the baby’s diapers. If such a man comes knocking to ask to rule a state, there is nothing bad in interrogating his managerial abilities to see how he has fared in life, especially in the little assignment of a home manager. Afterall, the Holy Writ, the Bible, enjoins that he who is faithful in little things should be given bigger and higher responsibilities (Luke 16:10)

Those statements by Oshiomhole are, to me, most inconsiderate and hare-brained considering his age, and absolutely unstatesmanlike going by his status as a former Labour leader, a former governor, a former National Chairman of a political party, and now a serving senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The devil-may-care way he said it all in the 59 seconds video is something a tear-away would cringe to say. It is misogyny carried too far. There is no justification for it, there is no excuse for such recklessness in public communication. The argument that Madam Betsy started it will not suffice here. When others are losing their heads, elders like Oshiomhole are expected to keep theirs. It is most unfortunate that at 73, Comrade Oshiomhole would choose to engage in a swine fight with a woman in the first place!

The APC stalwart is an experienced married man; one who has handled women for decades. One begins to wonder what lessons he has learnt in marriage if he could descend to the mud the way he did in this instance. If the younger generation can no longer look up to the older generation for wisdom, guidance and discretion in the face of provocation, what else is left of the society? This is beyond politics and its dirtiness. The outburst speaks more to the personality of the ex-governor. This is the same man who as governor told a widow, who only begged for sympathy, if not empathy, to “go and die.” I think I am genuinely ashamed. It is embarrassing if we must counsel Oshiomhole at 73 that it is unacceptable before God, and condemnable among men to deride a woman on account of her childlessness.

Childbearing, we need to reiterate, is an exclusive preserve of God, the creator, who gives and refuses to give. It is not for nothing that my people praise the Almighty as Aseyiowu (He who does as he pleases). On the other hand, failure or success in marriage is the man’s prerogative. If Betsy indeed alluded to whatever failure Oshiomhole’s candidate might have suffered in marriage, bad as that may be, it does not justify Oshiomhole’s mockery of Betsy and her husband, Governor Obaseki, on the account of their childlessness. Doing that, we need to tell the senator, amounts to mocking God and, who knows tomorrow? My countryside upbringing teaches me that eni omo sin ló bí’mo (It is who is survived by offspring that can be said to be fruitful). An elder does not run a zigzag. Edo people are too civilised. They are too cultured. That is why they intoned that elders don’t revenge insults with their age-long concept of ogieriakhi. The elders of my place also say when a child defecates in the family mortar, and the elder uses a rag to clean it up, it is akin to moving from one filth to another filth. Oshiomhole is an elder by all standards. Can we all appeal to him to please demonstrate that grey hair is all about wisdom?

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

Published

8 hours 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.

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What I Saw After A Lady Undressed Herself — Pastor Adeboye

Published

10 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

11 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.