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OPINION: Ifa’s Message For Our President

Published

1 year ago

August 13, 2024

By Suyi Ayodele

At the very beginning of time when the deities lived among human beings, Òrúnmìlà, the father of Divination, occupied a prominent space. He attracted many people to himself, friends and foes alike. He assisted many people to achieve their ambitions. Òrúnmìlà was instrumental to many becoming wealthy. He made nobles of not a few. He crowned and assisted in dethroning kings. He was powerful, influential and generous. But he has hubris. He was always ruthless whenever he saw any obstacle to his ambition.

A time came when Òrúnmìlà wanted to take the highest title among the deities. Of course, many rose in his support; those who wanted to repay his past good deeds. Likewise, some others who had felt cheated or ill-treated by Òrúnmìlà, also lined up against him. To these people, it was payback time. Two Òrúnmìlà’s partners in divination were ferocious in their opposition to Òrúnmìlà’s aspiration. What went wrong between them, only the gods could tell. But Òtúrúpòn and Òkàràn swore that Òrúnmìlà would not attain the position he sought. While Òkàràn was ready to shift ground if certain conditions were met, Òtúrúpòn was so determined, and nothing would persuade him to be soft on his erstwhile friend. The duo approached Èsù (the trickster deity) to assist them in their mission against the great diviner. Èsù kept them in his shrine, waiting to see what Òrúnmìlà would do.

At his wits end, Òrúnmìlà summoned his diviners to find a solution. Ifa revealed to Òrúnmìlà that his two enemies were waiting in ambush for him at the shrine of Èsù. Òpèlè equally told him that it was only Èsù that could save him and get him to the position he so desired. Sacrifices were prescribed. Among them was that Òrúnmìlà must carry 700 empty gourds and 4,000 cowry shells to the shrine of Èsù. How would one man carry those items at once? Ifa simply asked Òrúnmìlà to make the poor in the town to be happy. He was asked to attend to the needs of the masses reasonably.

For seven days, Òrúnmìlà took care of the needy. He fed them, divined for them pro bono, attended to every of their needs and asked the king to initiate policies that would make life bearable for the poor. The people were happy. On the eighth day, Òrúnmìlà brought out the sacrificial items and began to carry them. The people who came to thank him for the way he had treated them in the past one week saw his struggles with the items. They offered to assist Òrúnmìlà. The masses shared the items among themselves and Òrúnmìlà led the way to the shrine of Èsù, otherwise known as Elégbáa.

The noise from the items as the empty gourds and cowry shells knocked one another was terrifying. The noise produced a music, which according to the Odù, says: A ó pa Òtúrúpòn/A ó kan Òkàràn lésè (We with kill Òtúrúpòn. We will break the legs of Òkàràn). On hearing the music, which was just coincidental, the duo thought that it was a battle cry, and took to flight. Òrúnmìlà and his party arrived at the shrine, offered the items to Èsù. He was instantly proclaimed the head of all deities. Òrúnmìlà defeated his enemies without shooting a single arrow. The masses who made up his team were his strength. When a dog has the people behind it, even the monkey on a high tree becomes a meal!

Today is barely three days after the Annual Convention of my church, The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), with the theme, “Heaven”, ended. For those my fellow heaven-bound brothers and sisters, who may be wondering why I chose the path of divination early this New Year in the RCCG, I refer you to my new position in the cabinet of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu as Senior Special Adviser, Culture and Tradition (See “Dangote Refinery: Blind man and his yam scrapers”, published on July 30, 2024). It is in pursuant of that new office that I offer this ‘advice’ free of charge! But like the deity, Olúa, in my town is wont to say: I wish Tinubu not to accede to my divination so that at the fullness of time, he would say the Oracle warned!

The year 2027 is going to be a decisive year for Nigeria, Nigerians, and particularly for President Tinubu. It is the year that Tinubu will be seeking to be the head of all principalities and powers in the corridors of power as the ‘number one citizen’ of Nigeria. Tinubu will seek his second term in office, no doubt. Many will support him, just as many will be up in arms against him. The battle will be fierce, mean and bloody. The opposition camps will give all it takes for the president not to realise his second term ambition. President Tinubu should have no doubt in his mind that the Òtúrúpòns and Òkàràns of the nation’s political firmament will assemble all arsenals at their disposals to see the end of his political career. We will be on the fringes to observe events and lend our voices here and there, and from time to time, by God’s grace. However, the battle will rage most fiercely, in Tinubu’s camp. What should the president do? We shall come to that.

But first, let us establish this fact. With the way the #EndBadGovernance ‘protest’ was prosecuted and ended in the North, it is clear, even to the blind, that the Òtúrúpòns and Òkàràns of the North have parted ways with Tinubu’s Òrúnmìlà. What happened between President Tinubu and his old friends and allies from the North is left at the imagination of the deities as it happened in the divination above. The North, we all have come to realise, did not ‘protest’ hunger, inflation and the general pains in the land during the August1-10, 2024 EndBadGovernance ‘protest’. What ails the North most in the last 15 months of President Tinubu’s administration is the loss of power to the South.

The folks up the Niger River have not been able to reconcile themselves with the fact that they are no longer in charge. They find the prospect of a Tinubu second term too difficult to bear. So, when the opportunity came for them to ‘protest’ hunger, the North sent their youths to do it peculiarly. That region is ready to do anything, ready to give anything and ready to allow anything, for power to return to it. The prospect of a military intervention is a welcome development! They openly canvassed it! Sad! But it is understandable, anyway. When a region has no other business apart from the government, the loss of power, no matter how temporarl, can never be palatable.

During the build-up to the 2023 general election that produced the Tinubu presidency, many of us warned Tinubu then that it was fatal for the dog to make the tiger its best man. Such a relationship comes with a huge price. But when a man sets his eyes on the throne of his forebears, it is useless to caution him to tread softly. In the course of realising his ambition, everything, no matter how deadly, got a warm embrace from Tinubu. While one is tempted to salute his dexterity at executing all his political battles, one cannot but shrug at the tendency of Tinubu to throw caution to the winds. He befriended his most arch enemies. One of them was Nasir El-Rufai, the immediate past governor of Kaduna State. The public insults El-Rufai heaped on Tinubu prior to the 2023 race paled into insignificance as the same diminutive governor became the arrowhead of Tinubu’s campaign. That is what our politics is all about; no clear-cut ideology.

In power, Tinubu has made so many concessions to his ‘friends’ in the North. He has done everything he could to pacify them. With numerous appointments, to even creating a full ministry for the cows of the North, President Tinubu has demonstrated that he is a man ready to give in anything for his own personal comfort and ambition. But despite what he has done for the North, the same people came out during the EndBadGovernance ‘protest’ to show that they are implacable. The only thing that will pacify the North is a return of power to the zone. If you are wondering why the North behaved the way it did during the ‘protest’, you need to know the fable of the insatiable bird called Àlúkèrè. Here is the story.

Children, especially those from the countryside, love to play with birds. Growing up then, our parents caught birds for us to play with. We tied a tiny thread on the legs of the birds and made them take flight, while we pulled them back. It was fun. On our own too, as children, we set traps for birds and whenever we caught any, we brought it home to the elders. But there is this tiny bird that we were never allowed to keep and play with. The bird is very easy to catch because it finds it difficult to take its eyes off the baiting grains in our traps. But despite catching many of them, we were asked to release them back into the wild without hesitation. Àlúkèrè is never a domesticated bird. It ruins every home it is kept in. Its needs cannot be satisfied. No matter what the keeper does to make it happy, Àlúkèrè keeps singing that its life is better off in its own home where it is the lord. Incidentally, Àlúkèrè lives in lack, want and deprivation in the wild. The same reason it keeps wandering into traps, seeking food. But take it home to feed it good rations, it keeps singing:

Ebi á pa Àlúkèrè Ku/Hunger will kill Àlúkèrè

Response: Àlúkèrè

Kó bá sulé honi/ If one were to be in his own house

Response: Àlúkèrè

Honi a dáná a jeun/One will cook and eat

Response: Àlúkèrè

Honi adúgbà some mu/One will once in a while drink water

That is exactly the North Tinubu has been trying to pacify all because of 2027. President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan did the same. Rather than establish a Ministry of Cows for the North, Jonathan established nomadic schools for the ambulant pastoralist populace of the North. But that did not pacify them. They ensured he was practically chased out of power! Anything short of power is nothing for the region. It doesn’t matter the huge difference between the number of years the North has been in power and the alarming backwardness of the region, the zone still wants power and nothing more. Those children on the streets during the ‘protest’ are products of the wickedness of the elite class up there! That should get any rational mind worried. And this is why nobody up there appears to appreciate Tinubu’s rapprochement with the North! Come 2027, the North will queue behind any northerner that stands against Tinubu at the election. The only bragging right they have is the population. That itself is a ruse! In all this, Tinubu can change the narrative. He can do something that will make 2027 an easy ride. What do I think President Tinubu should do?

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

I refer the president back to Ifa’s counsel to Òrúnmìlà in the above divination. Nigerians, I have come to realise, don’t really bother about who rules them as long as life is more abundant. We demonstrate that in sports. Nobody cares if our National Team is populated by the Okechuckwus of this world or by the descendants of Ahmed Musa, or the offspring of Segun Odegbami. All they want is the gold medal!

So, if I were President Tinubu, I would, like Òrúnmìlà did, make food available for the masses by ensuring that farmers are no more molested by herders and bandits. I would ensure that Nigerians can travel on the highways without any fear of being kidnapped. As the president, I would take a look at the power sector and ask questions as to why the Power Generating Companies (GENCOs) generate so much but the Transmission Companies (TMs) could not transmit the megawatts generated for the Distribution Companies (DISCOs) to sell to the populace. I would address the issue of over-bloated cost of governance by cutting down on the number of political appointees and stem other profligacies. I would also not forget to look at the NNPC and its moribund refineries and do a decisive surgical operation there. In all the juicy pies where my family members, cronies and I have our hands, I will become more transparent and be above board. If indeed I were him, I would devote more time to good governance and leave politics for a while. I take a bet, if President Tinubu makes the welfare of the people the cornerstone of his administration today, when 2027 comes and the Òtúrúpòns and Òkàràns all gather, the masses will carry his sacrificial items to the shrine of Èsù with the battle cry: A ó pa Òtúrúpòn/a ó kan Òkàràn lésè (We with kill Òtúrúpón. We will break the leg of Òkàràn)! May the president hear and understand what the Oracle says!

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.

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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.