N5 Billion On “Travel and Training”: Inside Dayo Mobereola’s First Full Year Of Questionable Spending As NIMASA DG – Secrets Reporters Nigeria

Secrets Reporters

Dr. Dayo Mobereola was appointed Director-General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) in March 2024, arriving with promises of a “purpose-driven organisation” built on transparency and efficiency. Less than a year into that mandate, SecretsReporters has obtained and reviewed NIMASA’s expenses across ten travel and training lines and the numbers tell a story starkly at odds with the DG’s public commitments.

Combined, these ten lines alone show over N5 billion claimed spent in 2024, with a proposed 2025 figure climbing even higher, at a time when ordinary Nigerians are being told to tighten their belts under the weight of economic hardship.

Records seen by our online newspaper disclosed that the DG, Dayo claims N951,646,237.80 was spent on local staff travel in 2024, and in 2025, N1,332,304,732 goes down the drain, a jump of nearly 40% in a single year. No travel schedule, staff manifest, or route breakdown was seen by our team of reporters who went through the throve of documents to justify spending approaching a billion Naira moving staff around the country in one year.

Separate from staff travel, NIMASA’s executive management alone claims N341,000,000 in local travel spending for 2024. A dedicated, multi-hundred-million-Naira travel line reserved for a handful of senior officials, on top of the near-billion-Naira staff travel line above, raises the obvious question of what work Nigeria’s maritime executives are doing on the road that costs this much, and why the two travel budgets are kept separate rather than justified together.

According to the documents, N777,500,000 was claimed spent in 2024 solely on transport and travel logistics tied to staff training, not the training itself, but the movement of staff to attend it. 

A further N437,187,812 was splashed on short-term local training in 2024. SecretsReporters did not see the content, duration, trainers, or attendee list for any of the “short-term” trainings this figure spent by the DG covered.

N50,820,000 was claimed spent on long-term local training in 2024.

This is the single largest line in the documents reviewed by us; N1,543,456,653 claimed spent on international short-term training in 2024 alone. NIMASA did not list which staff travelled internationally, to which institutions, for how long, or at what per-participant cost, for a combined outlay of over N2.15 billion across the two years seen.

N148,800,000 was claimed spent on international long-term training in 2024, while N182,843,750 was claimed spent training staff who are exiting the agency. It is not clear if government is mandated to train staff who have reached retirement age and going home to rest.

The DG specifically approved N245 million for Operations Directorate in 2024 to spend on their training. N340,047,150 was also spent on training for the Cabotage, Maritime Labour Services and Ship Ownership Development directorate in 2024.