How Emeka Woke’s NOSDRA Paid N229.75 Million To Three Companies In One Day For The Same Contract Including An Inactive Company And A Firm That Does Not Exist On CAC Records

Secrets Reporters

Engr. Chukwuemeka Woke had been Director-General of the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency for seven months when 23 December 2024 arrived, appointed by President Bola Tinubu on 22 May 2024 and in office from June after the turbulent exit of Idris Musa, whose staff had protested that he still had years left on his second term. This newspaper can can reveal that on that single December day, the agency under Woke paid three “final payments” totalling N229,745,915.05 to three different companies for identically worded contracts: the “construction of oil spill aerial combat aircraft hangers, chemical, dispersants and storage facilities in Kaduna, Port Harcourt, Lagos and Calabar airports”.

Three contractors, one contract, one day

The vouchers, each marked final payment, moved within hours of one another: N77,674,305.73 to Patmag Engineering Nigeria Ltd (voucher 1001251820-1), N77,559,981.41 to Adei and Sons Nigeria Limited (voucher 1001251837-1), and N74,511,627.91 to TI-Ad Investment & Services Ltd (voucher 1001251485-1). Three contractors. One identical contract description, word for word and in one day. Either the agency split one contract into three, or it paid three times for the same job and Section 43 of the Public Procurement Act 2007 expressly prohibits the splitting of contracts to evade competitive bidding. Three near-identical sums on the same day for the same description bears every hallmark of a split. If instead they were truly three separate contracts for the same facilities at the same airports, then NOSDRA built the same hangars three times over, a duplication that the office of the auditor general of the federation alone can justify for breach of the value-for-money duty the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007 imposes on every spending agency.

The inactive company

CAC checks by SecretsReporters show that Adei and Sons Nigeria Limited (RC 959089, registered 9 June 2011) is officially INACTIVE – “visit CAC and update your status,” the portal says. Yet on 23 December 2024, NOSDRA paid this inactive company N77,559,981.41 as final payment on a major construction contract. Under the Financial Regulations, no ministry, department or agency may pay a contractor that cannot produce valid CAC and tax credentials. 

The firm that does not exist

Worse still: TI-AD Investment & Services Ltd was paid N74,511,627.91 could not be found on the CAC public search portal at all. Not under its full name, not as “TI-AD”, not as “TI-AD Investment”. A company with no footprint on the national company registry received seventy-four and a half million naira of public money as final payment for building airport hangars. Under the Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020, doing business under an unregistered name is an offence and paying such an entity from the public purse, without any verifiable legal existence, is the kind of transaction the Money Laundering (Prevention and Prohibition) Act 2022 clearly prohibits

The DTA bazaar

While contractors collected hundreds of millions, officials collected travel allowances in millions. In September 2024 alone, Aminu Mohammed Turaki received N6,018,500 as DTA to HYPREP remediation sites, N6,000,000 as DTA to an oil spill site and N5,959,000 as DTA to a field office – N17,977,500 in one month, plus N5,000,000 for the “Borno State Flood Disaster”. In the same period, Deji-Fabikun Olubukola Titilope collected N10,000,000 as DTA for a training programme and N5,000,000 as DTA to field offices, while Obasa Raphael Gbadebo got N5,000,000 as DTA to field offices. That is N37.98 million in duty tour allowances to three individuals. And the N5 million for the Borno flood deserves its own scrutiny: Sections 5 and 6 of the NOSDRA (Establishment) Act 2006 confine the agency to oil spill detection and response. Flood disaster relief in Borno State is not oil spill response and spending the agency’s vote on it is a misapplication of funds against statutory purpose, the very mischief Section 38 of the Fiscal Responsibility Act 2007 targets.

The DG’s own pay line

The records also carry a telling entry: on 28 September 2024, N6,904,048.20 was paid as “SEP 2024 Salary” to Woke Chukwuemeka who is the Director-General himself, by direct payment voucher. Salaries are processed through IPPIS, the payroll system the Federal Government made mandatory to kill ghost workers.