How Ahmed Bolaji Nagode’s Led NAPTIN Swallowed ₦2.77 Billion in Public Fees That Never Reached Nigeria’s Treasury – Secrets Reporters Nigeria

Secrets Reporters

The National Power Training Institute of Nigeria (NAPTIN) trains the engineers and technicians who keep the country’s electricity sector running, but documents available to SecretsReporters have found over ₦3.6 billion in irregularities across ten separate findings, and the overwhelming majority of that figure comes down to a single failure: ₦2,771,731,464.25 collected by NAPTIN as tender’s fees during its own procurement processes was never sent to the Consolidated Revenue Fund, the federal treasury account the law requires it to land in. 

Treasury regulations require that 100% of tender’s fees collected in the course of public procurement be remitted to the CRF without exception; on the audit’s own figures, ₦2.77 billion of NAPTIN’s collections simply never made that trip, leaving public revenue sitting outside the account it was legally owed to.

Auditors examining the Institute’s books ran into a second problem before they could even finish counting. NAPTIN denied them access to its audit records and supporting documents outright, an obstruction pattern SecretsReporters has now documented at multiple federal institutions. Section 85(2) of the 1999 Constitution guarantees the Auditor-General of the Federation access to the accounts of every government agency for exactly this purpose, and a refusal to produce records is a direct breach of that constitutional guarantee, one that also means every other figure NAPTIN has reported for the period rests on records the Institute itself would not let auditors see in full.

The remaining eight findings, smaller individually, still add up to a pattern of an institution whose internal controls did not hold. ₦547,214,158.13 worth of store items were received but never recorded in NAPTIN’s own stock records, a direct breach of the Financial Regulations 2009 requirement that every item procured with public funds be properly logged and accounted for. ₦196,587,875.25 went out for constituency and zonal intervention projects that were executed without the approval of the relevant authorities. ₦29,650,030.00 was spent on purposes other than what it was budgeted and approved for straightforward case of misapplication of public funds. 

A further ₦24,399,592.33 was tied to a contract payment made irregularly, ₦22,445,500.00 to consultancy payments made outside proper process, and ₦17,340,224.95 to contingency payments that likewise bypassed the required approval steps. Rounding out the file: ₦10,678,497.06 was lost to overpayment, and a combined ₦12,486,712.59 to ₦8,364,419.26 in under-deducted statutory taxes and ₦4,122,233.97 in tax under-remitted to the relevant authority represents money NAPTIN was required by law to withhold and hand over to Nigeria’s tax authorities in full, and did not.

Ahmed Bolaji Nagode serves as Director General of NAPTIN and supervised these financial improprieties.