In very strong terms on Monday, the All Progressives Congress told Nigerians that the truth about the Boko Haram insurgency was out and that the two prominent people fingered as sponsors of terrorism by Dr. Stephen Davis, the Australian negotiator contracted by Nigerian government in the heat of the abduction of the Chibok girls, must be arrested and handed over to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The party asked President Goodluck Jonathan to immediately take that action and hand over former governor of Borno State, Ali Modu Sheriff as well as immediate past Army Chief, Geneneral Azubuike Ihejirika, to the ICC so as to stem the tension in the country as the country was already disintegrating and needed to be salvaged urgently.
The full text of the press conference titled: 'Boko Haram: Finally, The Truth Is Out!' and addressed by the National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, is reprinted below:
Boko Haram: Finally, The Truth Is Out!
Good afternoon Gentlemen of the press, and thank you for honouring my invitation to this press conference.
Before I address you today, kindly permit me to play the full interview of Dr. Stephen Davis, the Australian negotiator who was appointed by President Goodluck Jonathan to help secure the release of the over 200 girls who were abducted by Boko Haram on April 15th.
The interview was aired on Arise Television on Thursday Aug. 28th.
INTERLUDE: PLAY VIDEO
Thank you for your patience, gentlemen
The All Progressives Congress (APC) like many well-meaning Nigerians had resolved long ago that the issue of the Boko Haram insurgency should not be politicized. In view of this, the APC expressed its willingness and readiness to cooperate with the Federal Government in neutralizing the insurgency. Regrettably however, instead of accepting this offer of cooperation, the PDP-Federal Government has consistently pointed accusing fingers at our Party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), as the sponsor of Boko Haram. They have called us all sorts of derogatory names, but failed to provide any shred of evidence to support their claim.
It has been very clear to us that the vehemence and persistence of this accusation, the deliberate distortion of statements made by our leaders to paint us as Boko Haram sponsors and the way the PDP-led Federal Government has gone to hire foreign PR firms, at a huge cost to taxpayers, as well as foreign and local hack writers to push this narrative, they were struggling hard to cover up something. We waited patiently knowing that the truth will one day surface.
In a rare moment of truth, a top official of the Jonathan Administration, no less a personality than the former National Security Adviser (NSA), Gen. Andrew Owoye Azazi, situated the Boko Haram problem within the PDP. Shortly thereafter he was fired, and he later died in controversial circumstances. Still we waited.
They distorted and misrepresented the statements made by our leader, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, to try to convince the world that he was indeed the main sponsor of Boko Haram. They continued to echo the same slander about Gen. Buhari that was started by Presidential Spokesman Reuben Abati in 2011, and for which he and his cohorts eventually begged to settle out of court and to apologize to the General. Still we waited.
When their attempt to link Gen. Buhari with Boko Haram failed, as his popularity among ordinary Nigerians continued to soar, he was suddenly attacked by suicide bombers. Those who planned the attack believed this as the final solution to what they perceived as the threat he represents to the realization of their ambition. By the grace of God, he survived. We do not claim to know those who attacked him, but we do know those who provided the atmosphere for that attack to take place. Still we waited.
When the government declared a state of emergency in three worst-hit states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe in 2013, thousands of troops were deployed to the three states. But the unusual happened. The number of attacks simply skyrocketed. It is common knowledge that in any territory that has been placed under a state of emergency, the military takes charge of security, erecting checkpoints as part of efforts to keep a tab on security. Such was the situation in Borno in April 2014, when over 200 girls were abducted and driven away in many trucks. Soldiers posted to a nearby checkpoint were said to have withdrawn shortly before the attack. Who ordered their withdrawal? Some of the trucks in which the girls were being carted away broke down, yet no one challenged them. Despite this bizarre occurrence, they refused to accept responsibility and continued to cast aspersion on our Party, the APC, as the sponsor of Boko Haram. Still we waited.
Boko Haram routinely enriched their arsenal with tanks, Armoured Personnel Carriers, guns, trucks and other military equipment which they seized from the Army. From the videos they release from time to time, one could see Boko Haram insurgents driving around unchallenged in convoys of up to 60 vehicles made-up of tanks and other military vehicles they seized from our military, in a territory that is under a state of emergency. What is happening? No one could fathom it. Still we waited.
A man known to all as the kingpin of Boko Haram, a man who helped to arm them so he could win elections and decimate his opponents, was moving around with the best security ever. He is a known ally of the President and he is not known to be under any immunity. Yet he was never arrested or even questioned. Still we waited.
In line with a Yoruba adage that says when a drum starts sounding too hard, it is about to burst, the PDP and the Presidency ratcheted up their attacks on our party, labelling us as Boko Haram sponsors. They hired a foreign firm, Levick, for US$1.2 million in taxpayers' money, as well as a number of out-of-luck hack writers and pseudo analysts, one of them from Russia, to help push the narrative. Still we waited.
Then their drum exploded!
Dr. Stephen Davis, a man hired by the President Jonathan-led Federal Government to negotiate with Boko Haram for the release of the Chibok girls decided to speak out, believing the best way to tackle the insurgency is to expose the sponsors. And who are they? On international television last Thursday, and as you have just seen and heard, he named former Borno Governor Ali Modu Sheriff and a former Army Chief, Gen. Azubuike Ihejirika, as the sponsors of Boko Haram.
Prodded by Sahara Reporters in a subsequent interview on whether Gen. Buhari and Malam Nasir el-Rufai were sponsors, he said the Boko Haram commanders who gave him the names of their sponsors did not mention their names. The die is cast. The truth is finally out! Boko Haram sponsors have been exposed. They are within the ruling PDP. They are friends of President Jonathan. He cannot pretend not to know who they are and what they have done and are still doing. His myriad of intelligence agencies, including the DSS and the DMI, cannot pretend they do not have any information on these men.
It is true that Ali Modu Sheriff was, until recently, a member of our Party. But the Party always suspected that he was a mole, planted to hijack or at best weaken the new Party for the PDP. He is not new to that role. He helped to decimate his former party, the ANPP, to an extent that the number of states under its control fell from seven in 2003 to three by the time he left as Governor.
We know for sure that Ali Modu Sheriff was planted in the APC to help decimate our party. We confronted him openly during the merger negotiation but he denied vigorously. His surrogate for the post of the Chairman of the APC, Chief Tom Ikimi together with whom they planned to hijack the Party for the Presidency was firmly rejected. Realizing they have failed, they fled our party and returned to where they came from, and were duly embraced by their controllers.
President Jonathan cannot pretend not to know the alleged role that Ali Modu Sheriff has played in the establishment and growth of Boko Haram, yet he never allowed the man to even be questioned by any of the security agencies under his control. All through his time with our Party, every time they accused us of sponsoring Boko Haram, on the basis of his presence, we challenged them if they had evidence to arrest any of our members who is suspected to be a sponsor, they never did. They dared not, because Sheriff was their agent. Even if he had remained in the APC after we democratically encouraged him to go, they would still not have arrested him.
Recall, gentlemen, that immediately Sheriff went back to the PDP, the Maiduguri Airport that had been closed to even the pilgrims from the state on grounds of security, was re-opened specially for him. What more evidence does anyone need that Sheriff was and remains President Jonathan's Man Friday?
Our Stand
The truth is finally out. We have been vindicated. We have no hand in the Boko Haram insurgency. The raison d'etre of our party is the well-being and security of Nigerians
The sponsors of Boko Haram are within the PDP and the Presidency. They are known friends of President Jonathan. He knows them and they know him.
The man who exposed these Boko Haram sponsors is a Jonathan-appointed Negotiator. He has no axe to grind, neither does he have any motive to shield the APC or portray the PDP/Presidency in bad light. In fact, if he had any sympathy at all, it is for the man who hired him, President Jonathan.
We have said it all along. Boko Haram was politicized purely for one reason, and one reason only: To be used as a trump card for President Jonathan to win another term. For that strategy to work, the APC, which they see as the only stumbling block to the PDP's victory in 2015, must be maligned and labeled. Gullible, duplicitous and self-serving politicians like Femi Fani-Kayode swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker, and started parroting the glaring lies. PDP spokesman Olisa Metuh, an obvious pawn on the chess board, followed suit, labelling a party that comprises Nigerians of all ethnic and religious hue a Janjaweed and Islamic party. Now he is stewing in his own juice.
In the process of this dangerous politics, the Nigerian military which was globally acclaimed for its impressive showings at various peacekeeping missions around the world, simply suffered collateral damage. Apparently, fifth columnists in the military has sold the force out, first by denying it of the necessary fighting tools and then weakening it to such an extent that even the little it had was being taken away daily by insurgents. When the patriotic Gov. Kashim Shettima of Borno tried to raise the issue of the poorly-equipped troops and their low morale, he was roundly pilloried. Now the world knows why!
Now that the cat has been let out of the bag and the real sponsors of Boko Haram have been exposed, we hope President Jonathan will summon the courage to do the right thing: Hand over the identified Boko Haram sponsors to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for investigation and prosecution.
There is no doubt that Boko Haram has committed crimes against humanity in its scorched-earth campaign against unharmed citizens, and the most appropriate body to investigate and try the sect's sponsors is the ICC.
According to Article 17 of the Rome Statute that set up the ICC, and to which Nigeria is signatory, the ICC is a court of last resort, expected to exercise its jurisdiction only if states themselves are unwilling or unable genuinely to investigate and prosecute international crimes.
In view of the fact that the alleged Boko Haram sponsors are either members of the ruling party or friends of the President, it is clear that the PDP-led Federal Government is unwilling and unable to try them, hence our call.
Nigerians can rest assured that the APC will not allow this issue to be swept under the carpet.
Now that it is clear that the PDP is behind Boko Haram for the sole purpose of winning next year’s Presidential Election, Nigerians must prevail on the PDP and the Presidency to urgently end this insurgency and the daily killing and maiming of innocent Nigerians!
The President must remember that he is the Commander-in-Chief! The buck stops on his desk. He must now do all it takes to stop the growing mess in our nation’s North-East.
Nigerians expect no less!
Abuja
 |
|
President Bola Tinubu has assured that all victims abducted during the attack on schools in Oyo State will be rescued, while condemning the reported killing of one of the kidnapped teachers.
This was contained in a statement issued on Monday by his Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga.
Bandits invaded the Esiele community in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State last Friday, abducting staff, students and pupils of Community Grammar School, Baptist Nursery and Primary School, and L.A. Primary School.
According to the statement, security operatives are working round the clock to rescue the victims and apprehend the bandits and their collaborators within the community.
Tinubu described the reported killing of one of the abducted teachers as barbaric and sympathised with Governor Seyi Makinde, the government and the people of Oyo State over the incident.
“I am saddened by the reported killing of one of the teachers kidnapped by the gunmen who invaded the community. I sympathise with Governor Seyi Makinde and commend the steps he has taken on the matter. I sympathise with the families of the kidnapped victims.
“The Federal Government is working with the Oyo State government to rescue all the victims. I commend the Inspector-General of Police and the Commissioners of Police in Oyo and Kwara States for their quick intervention and the deployment of a tactical and the Intelligence Response Team (IRT) team to rescue the victims.
“The IGP, following my instructions, is personally leading the tech-driven operation. We expect a breakthrough soon. The bandits and all their local collaborators will be fished out and made to face the full wrath of the law.
“Cases of kidnapping further make imperative the establishment of state police to man some of our underserved areas. The National Assembly should accelerate the enactment of the law creating state police,” the President said.
Governor Makinde, on Sunday, confirmed the killing of one of the teachers abducted alongside other victims and pledged that the government would continue efforts to rescue the remaining abductees.
He said that seven teachers and an as-yet-unconfirmed number of pupils were abducted.
The governor said one of the abducted teachers, believed to be a Mathematics teacher, was killed by the terrorists.
“What we know right now is that seven teachers were abducted. Unfortunately, we received a video this morning indicating that one of the teachers, understood to be the Mathematics teacher, was killed by the terrorists. Our prayers are with the family,” Makinde said.
Teachers protesting the abduction, killing of their colleagues in Oyo State.
Meanwhile, teachers on Monday shut down classroom activities in Ogbomoso and staged a peaceful protest to the TESCOM office in the town over the kidnapping of students and teachers, which resulted in killing of one teacher.
The protesters marched with placards bearing various inscriptions, calling on governments at all levels to intensify efforts toward securing the release of those currently being held captive by kidnappers.
The teachers also demanded improved security around schools and safer learning environments for both staff and students.
News
For years, the obituary of the African bank has been drafted with almost theatrical confidence. Fintech firms, armed with sleek apps, venture capital and evangelical jargon about “disruption”, were supposed to reduce traditional lenders to the financial equivalent of rotary telephones. Nigeria, with its youthful population and chronic distrust of institutions, looked especially ripe for such a revolution. Yet the latest numbers from the country’s biggest lenders suggest that reports of the banks’ demise were, to borrow Mark Twain’s phrase, greatly exaggerated. In 2025 four of Nigeria’s largest banks - Zenith Bank, United Bank for Africa, GTCO and First Holdco -processed a combined N570.17trn in electronic transactions, nearly 20% higher than the N477trn recorded in 2024. Electronic banking income climbed to N468.9bn. In a country where fintech firms have spent the better part of a decade declaring war on incumbents, the incumbents appear not merely alive, but flourishing.
The story is not that fintech failed. Quite the contrary. Nigerian fintech firms have transformed consumer expectations. They normalized instant transfers, simplified payments and exposed the lumbering inefficiencies of old banking halls where queues moved with the urgency of geological change. Companies such as Flutterwave, OPay and Moniepoint forced banks to innovate or perish. What is striking, however, is how effectively the banks adapted. Rather than resist digitization, Nigeria’s major lenders absorbed it into their existing advantages: enormous customer bases, regulatory familiarity, deep balance sheets and national reach. The result is that the country’s banking giants now look less like endangered dinosaurs than heavily armed mammals that evolved before the meteor landed.
Consider Zenith Bank. The lender processed N225.3trn in electronic transactions in 2025, up more than 32% year-on-year. Mobile banking transactions alone surged by over 80%, while internet banking rose nearly 50%. Those are not the numbers of an institution struggling to remain relevant. They are the numbers of a bank aggressively colonizing digital territory. UBA tells a similar story, though on an even broader continental scale. With operations spanning more than 20 African countries, the bank has quietly positioned itself as a pan-African payments platform disguised as a traditional lender. Its chatbot, Leo, now integrates cross-border payments through the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), an innovation aimed at easing intra-African commerce. In effect, UBA is attempting to solve one of Africa’s most persistent absurdities: the difficulty Africans face paying one another across borders without routing transactions through Europe, Asia or America.
GTCO, meanwhile, demonstrated how quickly consumer behavior can shift when convenience triumphs over habit. Its “Pay With Transfer” product exploded from relative obscurity into one of the country’s fastest-growing payment channels. The over 7,800% increase is the sort of statistic usually associated with cryptocurrency evangelists or miracle-weight-loss advertisements. Yet it reflects something more mundane and more important: Nigerians increasingly prefer frictionless banking. The implications are larger than quarterly earnings.
Nigeria’s banks are proving that incumbents can survive technological disruption if they possess three things fintech firms often underestimate: scale, trust and regulatory endurance. Banking, after all, is not merely about innovation. It is also about surviving crises, managing liquidity, navigating regulators and persuading customers that their money will still exist tomorrow morning. That matters enormously in an economy repeatedly buffeted by inflation, currency instability and policy volatility. Fintech firms excel at convenience; banks still dominate confidence. There is another irony here. Much of fintech’s early success depended on exploiting weaknesses in traditional banking infrastructure. Yet once banks modernized their systems, fintech firms found themselves competing not against complacent bureaucracies, but against institutions with decades of capital accumulation and millions of customers. The disruptors disrupted the banks into becoming better banks.
Nor is this simply a Nigerian phenomenon. Across Africa, a more mature relationship is emerging between fintech firms and traditional lenders. The early rhetoric of total displacement is giving way to partnerships, acquisitions and hybrid models. Many fintech companies now rely on banking licenses, banking infrastructure or direct collaboration with banks themselves. The revolution, in other words, is becoming institutionalized. This does not mean Nigeria’s banks are beyond criticism. Customers still complain about outages, failed transfers and fees that reproduce themselves with the fertility of rabbits. Regulatory uncertainty remains a permanent feature of the financial landscape. Cybersecurity threats are rising. Financial inclusion, though improved, remains uneven.
Nor should the banks become complacent. African consumers are famously impatient with institutions that mistake temporary dominance for permanent immunity. The same technology that empowered the banks can rapidly empower their competitors again. Still, the latest figures mark an important moment in the evolution of African finance. They suggest that digital transformation need not destroy incumbents; it can strengthen them. Nigeria’s biggest banks have managed something rare in corporate history: they allowed themselves to be disrupted without allowing themselves to be displaced.
The more profound lesson is about African capitalism itself. Too often, discussions about innovation on the continent are framed as a binary contest between nimble start-ups and obsolete institutions. Reality is proving more complicated. The strongest firms are increasingly those capable of combining technological agility with institutional heft. That combination may prove decisive as Africa’s financial systems deepen. The continent’s future banking champions are unlikely to be purely traditional banks or purely fintech insurgents. They will be institutions capable of behaving like both. For now, Nigeria’s banks can savor a quiet triumph. The fintech invasion arrived exactly as predicted. The old giants simply learned how to fight back.
Business
In The Spotlight
The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) achieved something remarkable in Edo State: it conducted one primary election and produced two winners, two vote tallies, two returning officers and, judging by the arithmetic involved, perhaps two entirely separate realities. In one universe, Omoregie Ogbeide-Ihama won comfortably with 27,154 votes. In another, Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu triumphed magnificently with 33,399 votes. Somewhere between those parallel dimensions lies the actual election, presumably wandering around Edo South looking for a credible collation centre. The Edo debacle is not an isolated embarrassment. It is merely the latest episode in the APC’s long-running national theatre of factional warfare, institutional indiscipline and administrative incoherence. For students of Nigerian politics, this was less a surprise than a ritual.
The Edo fiasco, however, was merely the latest instalment in the APC’s national anthology of disorder. In Ondo, the party transformed a House of Representatives primary into something approximating an evacuation exercise. Suspected political thugs stormed the APC secretariat in Akure while results were being announced, sending party officials, journalists and loyalists scrambling for exits. According to witnesses, the confusion began when a telephone instruction allegedly arrived ordering the process halted midway. The spectacle deteriorated further when committee members reportedly vanished altogether, including the secretary of the primary committee, leaving results hanging in bureaucratic limbo. A governing party had effectively misplaced its own electoral officials. Nigeria, sadly, has become so accustomed to administrative absurdity that such developments barely qualify as shocking anymore.
Elsewhere in Cross River State, one defeated aspirant felt compelled to issue a public sermon urging party members not to “burn down the house” over the outcome of primaries. The mere fact that this now passes for statesmanship tells its own story. In functioning political systems, losers concede because rules are accepted as legitimate. In the APC, aspirants increasingly appeal for calm the way flight attendants prepare passengers for turbulence: with forced optimism masking institutional anxiety. This is not accidental disorder. It is structural. The APC has evolved into that most dangerous of political organisms: a governing party incapable of governing itself, yet entrusted with governing 220 million people. It now treats internal democracy as a chaotic experiment. The comedy would be entertaining were the implications not so serious. Political parties are meant to serve as rehearsal rooms for governance. If a party cannot organize a primary election without producing rival winners like a malfunctioning photocopier, one begins to wonder how exactly it intends to organize a country.
This is, after all, the same party whose congresses and primaries have repeatedly resembled civil disturbances interrupted only briefly by accreditation. In Kano, factions have spent years behaving less like political colleagues than rival claimants to a disputed oil well. In Rivers, the party practically dissolved itself into legal confusion so severe that it became electorally invisible. In Zamfara, internal disputes once became so catastrophic that courts barred the APC from fielding candidates altogether, handing victory to opponents without them needing the inconvenience of campaigning. In Ogun, Osun and Imo, parallel executives and competing party structures became so common that one required a flowchart merely to identify the authentic faction of the authentic faction.
Even the APC’s national conventions often carry the atmosphere of an aristocratic family fracas conducted with microphones. Governors routinely fight ministers. Ministers undermine party chairmen. Chairmen are removed with the speed and discretion of Soviet officials disappearing from photographs. One APC national chairman after another has entered office proclaiming unity before exiting amid intrigue, rebellion or humiliation. The party changes its leadership with the nervous frequency of a company hiding accounting irregularities. And yet the APC insists on presenting itself as the custodian of national stability.
The deeper problem is philosophical. The party increasingly operates not as an institution bound by rules, but as a coalition of ambitions temporarily sharing office space. Ideology is absent. Procedure is negotiable. Loyalty lasts precisely until the next ticket allocation. Primaries therefore become less democratic exercises than exercises in managed hostility, where every aspirant arrives already convinced the process will be rigged unless rigged in his favor. The result is the political equivalent of organized confusion. Electoral officials announce contradictory results with straight faces. Aggrieved aspirants rush to television studios carrying documents thicker than doctoral theses. Party headquarters issues statements “reviewing the situation.” Courts prepare for another harvest season of injunctions. Meanwhile, ordinary Nigerians watch the spectacle with the exhausted resignation of people observing a generator that sparks every evening but somehow remains in use.
What makes the APC’s disorder particularly alarming is that it mirrors the wider condition of the Nigerian state under its stewardship. A government unable to coordinate fuel policy now struggles to coordinate candidate lists. A party presiding over chronic electricity failures cannot keep the lights on inside its own internal processes. The confusion at the primaries is merely governance in miniature.
Consider the broader landscape. Inflation ravages households while government officials argue publicly over economic direction. Security agencies contradict one another on terrorism statistics. The naira behaves like a currency undergoing emotional distress. Ministries announce policies only for other ministries to deny them hours later. Even basic governance increasingly resembles a relay race in which participants disagree on the direction of the track. In that sense, the Edo primary was not an aberration.
One must also admire, in a grimly academic way, the APC’s commitment to numerical creativity. In Nigerian party primaries, voter turnout often acquires supernatural qualities. Entire wards suddenly produce Soviet-style participation figures. Aspirants who cannot attract ten people to a policy lecture somehow accumulate thirty thousand votes before lunchtime. Democracy, in these settings, becomes less a counting exercise than a literary genre. Naturally, party loyalists will insist these crises merely reflect the vibrancy of internal democracy. This is akin to describing a building collapse as evidence of architectural creativity. Genuine democratic competition requires credible rules accepted by participants before the contest begins.
There is also something profoundly revealing about a ruling party perpetually consumed by itself. At a time when Nigeria faces economic hardship, insecurity and social strain, the APC remains trapped in endless internal combat over offices, tickets and patronage. It governs like a corporation whose executives spend more time fighting over boardroom seating arrangements than addressing impending bankruptcy. The tragedy is that this confusion gradually normalizes institutional decay. Citizens become accustomed to absurdity. Parallel primaries become ordinary. Contradictory officials become expected. Governance by confusion becomes culturally familiar. A country repeatedly exposed to administrative farce eventually loses its capacity for outrage.
And so, the APC continues: announcing unity while manufacturing division, proclaiming order while institutionalizing chaos, presenting itself as the guardian of democracy while struggling to count its own votes coherently. The Edo South primary was therefore more than a local dispute. It was a concise summary of contemporary Nigerian governance: two truths, competing authorities, procedural confusion and a system functioning just well enough to avoid collapse while failing spectacularly at credibility. A party that cannot govern its primaries now governs the republic. Nigeria, unfortunately, is living with the consequences.
Opinions
In The Spotlight
It is time to talk about Big Money!
President Tinubu signed the 2026 Appropriation Act of a massive N68.32 trillion on April 17.
Remember: Between presidential submission and National Assembly passage, the budget value jumped by a whopping 9 per cent, from N58.18 trillion. There was no public scrutiny as to what was added, by whom, or why.
This we do know: Tinubu allocated over N1.01 trillion to INEC for the 2027 election. He also provided the astonishing sum of N135bn not to enhance the quality of the elections, but for election lawsuits: the way you budget well ahead for disease and surgery rather than for healthy habits.
The Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre cried “Bigger Figures, Familiar Failures.” The IMF cited budget execution gaps.
The government continued to keep the detailed budget under wraps, leading to the Centre for Social Justice demanding that the Director-General of the Budget Office, Tanimu Yakubu, either publish the document immediately or resign.
The government had chosen to break Nigeria’s fiscal law rather than publish budget reports in three consecutive quarters, the Foundation for Investigative Journalism affirmed.
Despite all of that and much more, the budget had not been published as of the end of last week.
Big Money: In January, SERAP sued INEC for failing to account for “the missing or diverted N55.9 billion” concerning the 2019 general elections, following the 2022 Auditor-General’s report issued last September.
INEC issues in that report include:
Award of Contracts Without Due Process (over N41.3bn)
Irregular Payment for Smart Card Readers (over N5.31bn)
Procurement with Contradictory Supporting Documents (over N331m)
Payments without a voucher or evidence of supply (N3.485)
Payments without deducting the mandatory 1% stamp duty (over N2.19 billion)
Irregular Award of Contract for four Toyota Land Cruisers (over N297m)
This is fascinating given that months after the Auditor-General’s report emerged, INEC bragged about savings of N1.1 trillion from “procurement reforms.”
Reflect, for a moment, on that report alongside INEC’s procurement sainthood, in the same sentence.
Big Money: Former Power minister Saleh Mamman, found guilty of 12 counts, including using private firms to funnel money linked to government-funded power plants, has been sentenced to 75 years in prison for laundering N33.8bn.
Knowing how unusual this is in Nigeria, I would have said, “Greed, served!” But Mamman is missing (wink-wink).
He was not in court to be sentenced: another reminder that when you are a Big Man with Big Money, you can determine your own justice.
This is why tenure-limited governors sprint to Abuja from their states as soon as someone else takes their job, heading for the best hiding place in the land: the Senate!
We cannot celebrate “Greed, served!” when over 60 per cent of corruption cases against public officials partying in public remain unresolved after over a decade, with credible data shamelessly showing that only 144 of 393 cases reached final judgment between 2013 and 2026.
Which reminds me: the March 2026 OECD Anti-Corruption and Integrity Outlook 2026 found a 26-percentage-point gap between integrity regulation and implementation. This is particularly interesting because, in Nigeria, integrity is perhaps the most loathed term in the corridors of power. We don’t say it and don’t spell it.
More big money issues last week emerged in a bombshell report concerning the misappropriation of over N800 billion allegedly diverted from federal allocations by APC governors to fund President Tinubu’s re-election campaign.
If true, those would be state funds being illegally emptied into the president’s personal pockets. The government swiftly denied the allegations.
As in the case of the World Bank report, the African Democratic Party has demanded that the matter be investigated.
Finally, if you have not, you should read the World Bank’s April 2026 Development Update titled, “Nigeria’s Tomorrow Must Start Today: The Case for Early Childhood Development.”
It labels the Nigerian economy as fragile, noting that inflation is punishing households. It also pointed out that FAAC gross revenues rose from N17.1 trillion in 2024 to N37.4 trillion in 2025, increasing from 7.9 per cent to 9.5 per cent of GDP, but flags 5,000 TSA gaps.
It further projected that the number of poor Nigerians rose from about 40 million in 2019 to over 60 million during the Bola Tinubu years.
The Bank acknowledges some reform progress but calls for far more: stronger monetary implementation, increased organic FX flows, electricity sector reform, lower cost of governance, higher non-oil revenue, improved fiscal governance, clearance of audit backlogs, monthly reconciled fiscal data, and more credible budgets.
At the upper echelons of Nigerian governance, they must have winked at one another and guffawed: “More ke? Make we do more?”
But the most important element of the report is the alarm it raises about Nigerian children, with the Bank defining Early Childhood Development as an economic priority.
The World Bank’s figures:
Nigeria has about 7 million births every year
Over 110 children per 1,000 die before age five.
Over 40 per cent of children are stunted.
Over 52 per cent are not developmentally on track.
Only 30 per cent of children aged 3–5 can identify five letters, and 34 per cent can recognise numbers from 1 to 5.
The report notes that children who are not stunted are 1.6 times more likely to complete primary school and more than twice as likely to complete secondary school. It also points out that Nigeria’s under-five mortality and stunting rates are significantly worse than those of countries with similar income levels.
Meaning: The poverty capital of the world has another serious human capital problem that might make no sense in the Renewed Hope calculus or understanding: early deprivation becomes school failure, then weak labour-market participation, and ultimately low national productivity.
Keep in mind: this is in a country in which, seven years ago, the ruling APC pledged that it would lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years.
But this is not a promise that APC is proud of, because in its tender care, Nigeria is travelling more deeply into poverty. As its chieftains borrow and spend, travelling in the executive jet and bulletproof SUVs, the party neither mention the pledge nor offers any apologies.
APC has a serious character problem, which is why it recognises neither its official manifesto, nor even Jagaban’s remodelled, or Renewed Hope. Each is loaded with promises that nobody honours or even remembers.
So, who is going to tell APC to save the Nigerian child?
This is exactly why Nigeria has become a land of smoke and hot air in which neither Nigeria nor Nigerians matter. Because while you can take what you don’t own, you can’t give what you don’t have.