News

OPINION: Ibadan Blast, Makinde And Federalism

Published

2 years ago

January 22, 2024

By Lasisi Olagunju

Mr Youssouf Sawane, a Malian money-maker, leads miners from Mali in Oyo State. He was asked by the Nigerian Tribune how much his group was paying into the coffers of the Oyo State government. He answered that he owed the Oyo State government nothing; his business was with the Federal Government. Displaying a remarkable knowledge of Nigeria’s centrist federalism, the Malian said “natural resources deposited in states are owned by the Federal Government…We are paying to the Federal Government.” The Malian made that statement in November, 2020 – three years, two months ago. But, last week, when explosives allegedly from Malian groups’ mining misbehaviour devastated the length and breadth of Ibadan, it was the Oyo State government and its people that had to carry the can of the resultant humanitarian crisis. That was a classic case of paying for what one did not buy. It is normal with Nigeria.

Until the social media exploded with cries of a deadly blast in Bodija, I thought it was an impudent rainstorm that played pranks with my rafters. Google Map says my house is some 30 minutes drive (14.8km) to the epicenter of last week’s explosion at Bodija Estate, Ibadan, yet the bang rattled my roof and shook my doors. People died in Bodija where it happened; the estate lost a whole street. Adjoining streets got scarred with mortal injuries – the kind you see only in today’s Gaza. An elderly friend, former minister and ambassador to Germany lives on the street next to the incident scene. I remembered that fact and rushed a call to him that night. An otherwise strong man was heard struggling for words to describe what happened. His building was safe but the bang scrambled his furniture and cracked his things.

A spark in a duplex set off that explosion which shook the entire city. You’ve probably read stories of a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia and causing a hurricane in the Caribbean, South America. It is in a 1990 American film entitled Havana. You’ve also read of a golden butterfly whose death dramatically altered the way the world works. It is in Ray Bradbury’s science fiction short story, ‘A Sound of Thunder.’ Those two works and some others are attempts at explaining the nature of chaos – how small fires lead to conflagrations. Chaos theorists call it the butterfly effect and they have several examples. One was the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in June 1914 which historians say was the catalyst for the two world wars. Another was the 1945 swap of the serene city of Nagasaki for the arms factory city of Kokura. Kokura was the original target of America’s plutonium bombing but a cloud blocked the B-29 crew’s view of the target. Three times the pilot scanned Kokura, three times the pilot saw nothing. The cloud below stood between the bomb and its intended victim. Because the opened bays must deliver their load of death, the bombsight panned elsewhere to the backup target. Nearby Nagasaki got the horrific atomic bomb and lost some 100,000 lives.

Because of some small men and failure of intelligence, boisterous Ibadan lost its security last week. It is still in shock. Almost all survivors of the explosion spoke of that moment of flash and sudden death. A survivor said he thought “we were being bombed.” A former deputy governor who lost his home said “I thought I was dead.” The living victims’ accounts of how it happened keep sounding like it was another America bombing World War II Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hiroshima received the first atomic bomb, named ‘Little Boy’, on August 6, 1945. The second was ‘Fat Man’ which knocked out Nagasaki four days later on August 9. Explosives, whether low or high, know neither purity nor neutrality nor innocence. Cindered with Nagasaki in 1945 were, ironically, its anti-war Catholics who massed for God at a Mass. They all got incinerated with their Urakami Cathedral. Many unsoiled souls, including a U.K. returnee, died in the Ibadan explosion.

FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: For Nigerian Soldiers And Judges

We’ve not heard that those who kept the explosives went with the disaster. All we know for now is that around 7.45pm on Tuesday, 16 January, 2024, Dejo Oyelese Close in Bodija, Ibadan had its own Nagasaki experience. Some foreign fellows warehoused suspected high-order explosives in a building there for illegal mining. No one took note that that was an accident waiting to happen. No one remembered Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time. As should be expected, something went wrong with those explosives. In catastrophic proportions, they rained devastation and terror on the city. Is somebody asking how many more volcanoes of dynamites are stocked unseen in towns and cities where these miners operate?

We all ask what kind of people would keep military-grade explosives in residential apartments. We forget that some businesses share meaning with daredevilry. Mining is one. In the normal world, the shell of the snail is spared after eating its meat but miners eat the snail with its shell. Only devils do that, and in myths. Go to the precious stone mines in Oke Ogun (Oyo State), the gold mines of Ilesa (in Osun State), Maru and Maradun (in Zamfara). If you are looking for those who eat rams with their horns, they are the operators in those places of blood money. Even vultures do not eat sacrifices with the offering pans but miners do. It is at the mines that you encounter men who munch tortoise flesh and shell. No fellow-feelings, no empathy for man and the environment. They go for money and money only; it is the only matter that matters.

A Malian whose home country has not known peace for almost a decade now because of federalist issues is benefiting from our crooked ‘federal’ structure here. A decade ago, the Tuareg rebels of Mali demanded a federal system that would grant sovereign rights to individual states. But the then government said no. “Mali is a unitary state. The subject of a federal state is not on our schedule…reforms must be done within the framework of a unitary state.” The rejection of that demand birthed today’s Mali of chaos and terror. It is a mini Nigeria.

I call Sawane and his group federal agents. They are instruments of the Federal Government – the man claimed in that 2020 interview that his activity and those of his people were licensed by Abuja. He said so three years ago and there has been no rebuttal from the supposed licensor. Even after the sad event of last Tuesday, the government at the centre has still not said that the man lied.

Coincidentally, earlier on the day the barrel bombs of Abuja’s miners exploded in Ibadan, killing and destroying all on their way, Oyo State governor, Mr Seyi Makinde, was at the University of Ibadan begging friends of the Federal Government to get their knees off the neck of Nigeria and allow its rebirth as a true federation. Makinde declared at Chief Bisi Akande’s 85th birthday lecture at the University of Ibadan that there was “a strong link between the trio of fiscal federalism, restructuring and state policing, and running a government that places the people’s interest first.” He stressed that it had become imperative for the country to consider the path of constitutional reform to accommodate these ideas if the government would begin to benefit the people.

FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Pastor Adeboye And King-size Destinies

Perhaps if Nigeria had been a proper federation, a track of legal and illegal miners would have been properly kept and an Oyo State-owned police would have uncovered the ‘bombs’ before they went off. And, perhaps those alien wasps of death would not have nestled undetected in the canopy of elite Bodija Estate. The United States where we copied our federalism does not suffer such maladies. American states have considerable control over their lives and resources. That is why they prosper and their country continues to brag and swag as the strongest of the superpowers.

Miners in Nigeria have zero respect for their states of operations. Abuja is where their bread is buttered and that is the shrine where they worship. Our constitution vests ownership of lands in governors, yet it forbids states and their governors from controlling mining on those lands. The Nigerian Minerals and Mining Act forever lurks as Abuja’s waiting hammer against errant states. Its Part 1, Sections 1 and 2 are a study on how not to structure a federation: (1) “The entire property in and control of all mineral resources in, under or upon any land in Nigeria, its contiguous continental shelf and all rivers, streams and watercourses throughout Nigeria, any area covered by its territorial waters or constituency and the Exclusive Economic Zone is and shall be vested in the Government of the Federation for and on behalf of the people of Nigeria. (2) All lands in which minerals have been found in commercial quantities shall, from the commencement of this Act, be acquired by the Government of the Federation in accordance with the provisions of the Land Use Act.”

That law gives no role to states in the extraction – or even in the regulation of extraction, exploration and exploitation of all mineral resources in their territories. If a governor thinks he is clever and wants to dodge that bullet by investing in this sector, he will have to ‘dobale’ for the minister in Abuja for licences to operate in his own territory. And, if you are a state governor and you feel aggrieved by the unfairness of what you see and you want to go to court for redress, think twice. The law has been carefully structured to take care of such audacity. Cases on mines and minerals can only go to the Federal High Court. The court of ‘the enemy’ has exclusive jurisdiction on mine and mining matters.

Nigeria is the only federation on earth where everything is warehoused in the pocket of the central government. But it has not always been like this. If our ancestors read the Malian in Ibadan as he said he paid mining dues to only the Federal Government, they would shake their heads in surprise and sadness. Nigeria became a federation in 1954 through the Lyttelton constitution with all the regions retaining all rights and powers that have now been taken from the successor states. Even before 1954, the country was not as choky as it is today. Africa’s preeminent historian, Toyin Falola, dug into mining matters thirty-two years ago. I read his ‘An Ounce Is Enough: The Gold Industry and the Politics of Control in Colonial Western Nigeria’ (1992). I have read that piece like four times in the last two years. It teaches me that miners of all ages are the same in behaviour. It also teaches that Nigeria has not always been this structurally crooked with no respect for law and its enforcement. Falola takes us through the bumpy roads of colonial construction of legal frameworks for the mining industry. Illegal miners existed but they were not allowed to ply their trade as if the law did not exist to take care of their criminality. There were laws against the kind of illegality that birthed the Ibadan tragedy. There were licences for miners and dealers. Every inch of the road from the mines to the gold market was policed with the law. There was the Hawker’s Licence for those who wanted to trade in the products manufactured by goldsmiths. Significantly, unlike now that all licences are minted and sold by the big boss in Abuja, the colonial law vested the power to grant this licence in the Resident. The Resident was the equivalent of today’s state governor.

My old university teacher, Professor Adebayo Williams, described the Ibadan tragedy aptly as the apocalypse. It was an accident that should not have happened if Nigeria had been a country ruled by the law. But if you are a compulsive scorner of wise counsel, you will make seers of your advisers. If you are deaf to sacrifice, you will vindicate the diviner. The diviners here are Governor Makinde and all who believe in having a proper federation that would make invasions from Mali and elsewhere impossible.

It was nice reading words on federalism from the governor. But his sermon that day were to the deaf. In his audience were scorners of truth, sniggerers of wise counsel – people who flapped their ears as he finished speaking. They are very comfortable that day and today with Nigeria’s structure of unfairness because they have seats in the royal court. The Yoruba among them think their capture of Abuja must not be upended by any talk of justice and restructuring. They think their old call for a structural reappraisal of Nigeria should be dead. I wish they listened to Christian revivalist, Vance Havner’s three-word counsel: comfort precedes collapse. The dry winds of harmattan will soon land from the north to whip loin-clothed backsliders back to their senses. There is no escaping the snares of Nigeria as it is. Without the country restructuring as the Oyo State governor advised, there will continue to be bad news north and south. Bandits will rule the day; kidnappers the night. The Federal Government will continue to license felons to wreck the states and their ecosystems. The states will remain broke, broken and prostrate and useless to their people. Local and foreign vultures will continue to tug at the entrails of the comatose behemoth. Criminalities of various hues will keep their foot on the pedal, driving the country towards certain death.

May the souls of those who died in the Ibadan explosion rest in peace. May their families and those who lost property there be comforted; may the wounded be healed.

News

[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.

News

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.

News

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.