Modibbo Adamawa University Awarded ₦2.56 Billion in Contracts With No Advertisement, No Bidding, No Eligibility Checks

 Secrets Reporters

Modibbo Adamawa University, Adamawa State under Professor Abdullahi Liman Tukur paid out ₦2,558,166,409.97 for twenty-one contracts between 2021 and 2022 without any evidence that the jobs were advertised, bid for, evaluated, or approved by the Tenders Board, this is revealed by SecretsReporters.

The payments were drawn from various budget votes. When examiners asked for the supporting paperwork, there was no advertisement, no bid submission records, no bid evaluation, and no Tenders Board approval. Nor was there any documentation showing the contractors met the mandatory eligibility criteria required before any award can be made.

Section 24(1) of the Public Procurement Act 2007 requires all procurement of goods and works to proceed by open competitive bidding. Section 25(2) requires every invitation to bid to be advertised on the procuring entity’s notice board and website, in at least two national newspapers, and in the procurement journal, no fewer than six weeks before the bid deadline.

Those provisions exist for a reason. Open advertisement and competitive bidding are the mechanisms that keep contract awards transparent, ensure value for money, and prevent public funds from being steered to favoured contractors. When twenty-one contracts worth over ₦2.5 billion move without any of that, the scrutiny has no way of knowing whether the University got what it paid for or whether the process was fair at all.

The University’s management did not accept the finding. It insisted its standard practice is to pre-qualify every contractor through its Parastatal Tenders Board before award, and described it as “inconceivable” that all twenty-one contracts would have proceeded without the required documents.       

The examiners were not persuaded. The response was found unsatisfactory, and the finding remains valid until the recommendations are implemented. A claim of standard practice, the review noted, cannot substitute for documentation that should exist. If the records were kept, they should have been produced. They were not.

A second finding concerns ₦188,380,939.30 paid for consultancy services with no evidence that a contract was ever awarded for the work. Paragraph 708 of the Financial Regulations 2009, which prohibits payment for goods and services not yet supplied or performed, applies here, alongside Paragraph 2909’s contractor eligibility requirements.

Professor Abdullahi Liman Tukur served as Vice-Chancellor from May 2019 until his tenure ended in 2024, covering both the examined period and the 2021–2022 window in which the twenty-one contracts were awarded and paid. Professor Ibrahim Umar has served as Vice-Chancellor since 14 August 2024.