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OPINION: For Nigerian Soldiers And Judges

Published

2 years ago

January 15, 2024

By Lasisi Olagunju

A gentleman strolled into my office sometime ago and gave his surname as Adamasingba. In my almost thirty years in Ibadan, I had identified the name ‘Adamasingba’ solely with a stadium in the city. I never knew there was a family in Ibadan – or anywhere in Yoruba land – with that name. But here stood before me a man bearing that long, tongue-twisting sentence of a name. And, because I make trouble with questions, I asked my guest the meaning of the name he bore. At least, he should know. And he answered me: “It means ‘he who commits an offence and refuses to serve the sentence (a-dá-ràn-má-sin-igbà).’” He said the man who gave the family that name was a warrior; a strong man whose service to the land was so enormous as to make him too strong for the law to deal with, even when he violated the law. I was not shocked to hear that. I knew that such above-the-law stories dot almost every page of gallantry.

A thief was dragged before Bashorun Ogunmola, benevolent maximum ruler of Ibadan. His crime was that he stole a hunter’s game, a deer that struggled and died on his farm. But the accused did not deny stealing what he was accused of stealing. He simply told Ogunmola that when he saw the animal bleeding and gasping for breath, he remembered his feat at the warfront, how he faced enemy fire, carried the dead and rescued the wounded. “So, I told myself: I that carried human beings under a hail of bullets at the warfront, would I fail to carry away a mere animal at the fringes of my farm (èmi tí mo gbé omo ènìyàn l’áàárin ìjà, sé n ó a gbé omo eranko tì l’áàlà oko bí?).” Ogunmola heard him and shocked all around. He called the man a sacred cow, discharged and acquitted him and gave him a bottle of gin to wash down the meat he stole. Such reasonings explain why very bad sins are never committed by known soldiers. They explain why unknown soldiers carried the can of the destruction of Fela’s Kalakuta Republic.

But a nation of sacred cows is on the road to perdition. Unfortunately, in this country, we have always known that some institutions are hallowed and their operatives sacred. The judiciary is one. The military is one. Operatives of those two institutions believe they should normally be above rebuke, whatever their sin. When Lagos State governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, caught a soldier riding on a wrong lane and the soldier told him repeatedly: “Sir, I’m a soldier. I’m a soldier, sir”, he was sending a code, an invite, telling the governor to take it easy and inviting his attention to the ‘sacredness’ of the institution he worked for. That mindset may be repulsive to us bloody, cold civilians, but to those in the hot brotherhood of the sword, indulgence is what we owe them for their agreeing to fight and die so that we may live. Someone said wars are morbid human sacrifice ceremonies and soldiers scapegoats, sacrificial lambs on war platters. Historian and colonial administrator, Percy Talbot, in his ‘The Peoples of Southern Nigeria’ published in 1924, wrote about human sacrifice and the special place of its victims: “A person about to act as scapegoat (and who would) take upon himself the sins of the people and bring them good fortune was usually treated with the greatest respect and indulgence by all and given the best of everything..”

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Soldiers are lambs of sacrifice; they are pampered and cosseted with indulgence. A soldier is coddled with velvet tanks and with thankfulness because of his life of sacrifice. He is allowed everything, including the freedom to die for his country, but he is not allowed to commit suicide or murder. When anyone, including a soldier, drives against traffic, he is likely to kill himself and/or kill innocent others. Towards the end of last year, a top politician in Ibadan was critically injured and his two legs amputated because a murderous individual drove against traffic and ran, head on, into his car. That is why the law says no rider or driver should face where the world backs. If they don’t kill or wreck themselves, they murder or destroy others. You heard Sanwo-Olu’s response when the traffic offender announced “I am a soldier, sir.” The governor’s response was: “That’s the more reason I’m going to lock you up.” A soldier’s life is especially precious – just as all lives. Apart from being an officer of the law who must obey and enforce the law, the society also has a duty to ensure that a soldier does not hurt himself or the society. We need the soldier because of tomorrow’s war. Indeed, all investments on him are directed towards that end. Nigerian culture scholar, Joseph Awolalu, in his ‘Yoruba Sacrificial Practice’ (1973), describes how persons being bred to die for the traditional Yoruba community were treated. He said “they were given all the good things that they asked for, except their liberty and their lives.” That is it. Think about that in relation to a soldier and society’s duty to protect him from himself. A society must be safe from its guard’s excesses and he must be kept safe because of the enemy outside. That is my reading of Sanwo-Olu’s arrest of that soldier on that Lagos road. The reason the offender’s “I am a soldier” code did not work.

Perhaps because of esprit de corps and the feeling of being special and sacred, one soldier came to his colleague’s defence and abused the governor in an online video post. He said soldiers were not under the control of any state governor and stressed that they “take orders” only from their bosses in the barracks. The outburst was not funny and I read a huge disapproval across the nation. I read reactions that said the governor was right to personally enforce the law of his state. I read reactions that said we are in a democracy and soldiers must submit themselves to the law and to civil authorities. I agree(d) with all of them. Then I read the cool comment of the Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Taoreed Lagbaja. He was shown in Lagos a few days ago distancing the institution he heads from the action of that soldier who violated the law on the highway, and the one defending a soldier’s right to ride (and die) on one-way. Lagbaja said those two did not represent the values of the Nigerian Army and that the one who attacked the governor on social media had been arrested. He said: “I want to say that the soldier that was apprehended by the governor of Lagos State while plying one-way does not represent the Nigerian Army. In every respect, he contravened what we stand for, which is discipline. He also contravened the constitution and the law of Lagos State. We frowned at that as the army. The army has investigated that (other) soldier (who abused the governor online) and he has been apprehended and we are investigating.” That is what Lagbaja said and it is reassuring that our army is not “an army of anything goes.” Our country would be well and safe without an army of the uncouth. America’s first president, George Washington, in July 1759 said in a letter to some officers at the warfront that: “Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak and esteem to all.”

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But, without sacrificing discipline and loyalty, can I plead for clemency – particularly for the traffic offender? I heard him say “sorry” more than once. Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States, advised us to “never ruin an apology with an excuse.” Although the Lagos offender ruined his apology with the excuse of being a soldier, I still think he should be given another chance. Portia in Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’ says of mercy: it drops “as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath…it blesses him that gives and him that takes.”

The other sacred cow we have is the judiciary. In discussing this bovine institution, I will hide behind the Supreme Court’s pronouncements of last week. Delivering judgments in several governorship election cases on Friday in Abuja, the Supreme Court used some words of rebuke for the Court of Appeal. One of the justices of the apex court described some decisions of the appeal court as “perverse.” Another lamented that “a lot of people have suffered” because of wrong judgments of the appeal court. That was an oblique reference to the situation in Plateau State where the lower court sacked the governor and all lawmakers who won elections on the platform of the PDP based on a law that was not in our law books. Another justice of the Supreme Court berated the appeal court judges for going into the issue of party membership, nomination and sponsorship of candidates in Kano, Zamfara and Plateau states. They did that in flagrant refusal to follow several decisions of the Supreme Court to the effect that a political party cannot challenge matters that are internal, including the primary election, of another. If a party did that, the law says it would be a meddlesome interloper. Our appeal court was found by the Supreme Court to have given such interlopers comfortable spaces in the chambers of justice.

Sixteen members of the Plateau State House of Assembly and eight National Assembly members from that state permanently lost their seats in November 2023 to deliberately wrong decisions and reasonings of the Court of Appeal. The fatal reasons behind the appeal court decisions have now been declared perverse by the Supreme Court. Let me be plain here: The Court of Appeal in November 2023 held that the PDP structure in Plateau State collapsed since 2020, therefore the party should not claim to have a structure to sponsor any candidate to contest an election. But that is not the law as clearly laid down by the Supreme Court in previous judgments. The National Working Committee of the party is the structure that the law recognises as the legal sponsor of candidates for elections. The Supreme Court said so a long time ago. And that precedent was supposed to bind the appeal court judges – but like the errant soldier in Lagos, they chose to drive against the traffic of the law. One after the other, the lead justice and his brothers gave the seats to the (unelected) opposition. Then they cavalierly applied the same reasoning to the governorship case and reached the same conclusion. The state governor, however, had the grace to proceed to the Supreme Court. He did and got delivered from the snares of the Court of Appeal’s fowler; the lawmakers are left stranded. They cannot go further than the court which served them injustice.

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Our law, as of today, says those judicially robbed lawmakers cannot seek any remedy for the fatal wrong; the Court of Appeal is legally their last bus stop. But should those victims just go quietly into the night, their mandates frozen forever in the winter of judicial banditry? Just like that? Should they and the law watch the inheritors of stolen chariots ride daily to the capitol to make laws for ‘good governance’? What options do the victims have and what advice should they get? I remember my law teacher’s cliché: for every wrong, there is a remedy. I believe he was right here. He was right in telling me also that where and whenever my right is invaded or destroyed, the law gives a remedy to protect it or award damages for its loss. I also believe the teacher when he added that where and whenever my right is denied me, the law is there to afford the remedy of an action for its enforcement. He said every lawyer knows this to be true and that the words he used were harkened words of justice any student of law would find even in elementary law books. The principle here, he said, is clothed with the Latin phrase: ubi jus ibi remedium (where there is a right, there is a remedy). The teacher told me further that the court has a range of remedies to choose from: They could be declarative, they could be preventive, or coercive, or compensatory and/or restitutionary. He said he was quoting Hammond J who asked with uncommon depth that “if we were drawing up a remedies scheme de novo, would we not include a basket of all the potential modes of relief, and leave it to a court to select that which is appropriate in a given case?” The court here is the court of the Chief Justice of Nigeria and the National Judicial Council. Will they be willing to bell this cat and set a precedent in demolishing this castle of injustice?

A judge deliberately delivers a rogue judgment, fatally wounding a party, and he gets promoted. The appeal court judge who signed the disgraceful ‘hybrid’ judgment on Kano governorship is now, with uncommon grace, at the Supreme Court. The ones who rode against the traffic of the law and justice, who closed their eyes and delivered injustice in Plateau State are counting their blessings in their cozy quarters. You see, the ground of Nigeria no level at all. A medical doctor prescribes the wrong drug which leads to death and he loses his licence. Why is it that there are punishments for negligent doctors whose bad judgments lead to deaths, and there is no punishment for judges whose bad judgments lead to irreversible injuries – even death? The only answer is that they are not just cows; they are sacred. ‘No matter what we do/We are going higher’ is the song in the Nigerian judiciary.

The soldier who offended Lagos traffic law was contrite with an effusion of sorries. You would never hear a word of remorse from those judges who turned the law upside down and ignored the Supreme Court and the laid-down precedents. How should we, therefore, treat the arrogant sickness of the courts? An American lawyer, Jean Teillet, in a February 2018 article wrote that “to believe in justice, we must probe our sacred cow: the system itself.” Teillet, while urging her compatriots to “let’s fix” the broken judiciary, said “the cost of doing nothing has already brought the justice system into disrepute.” If those words came from a Nigerian today, they would fit into our situation. That is why I beg to ruffle some feathers by asking that the ‘secular’ robes of errant judges be made profane and the masquerader’s costume rent. About 31 years ago, Justice Olajide Olatawura sat in our Supreme Court and addressed an issue as this. He prescribed what should be the system’s reaction to judges to whom the obligations inherent in the doctrine of ‘stare decisis’ are matters determined by their capricious tastes and dispositions. Olatawura said: “The hierarchy of courts shows the limit and powers of each court. Therefore, to defy the authority and powers of a higher court appears undesirable and distasteful…A refusal by a judge of the court below to be bound by the decision of this court is gross insubordination and such a judicial officer is a misfit in the judiciary…” Those words are not mine; they came straight from the pantheon of truly great men, builders of today’s throne for today’s men of law. We may ignore them, and we will, especially since we appear to hold that our judges are like Ibadan’s Adamasingba – they sin without consequences.

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

Published

18 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

20 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

20 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.